Prowell, at his drawing board in his Sebastopol workshop, has renovated Victorians, designed and built restaurants and now designs custom furniture and gates

By age 16, custom woodworker Charles Prowell made good pocket money working for his step-father, an Illinois contractor. "He built houses, " Prowell remembers. "My job was to build fences. That was one of the first things I could do all on my own. I didn;t set the fence posts because i was too small. But I cut and nailed all the rails to the fence posts. Prowell, now 47, left his step-father's employ after finishing college at Southern Illinois University and moved to San Francisco, where he spent ten years renovating victorians and designing and building restaurants. Eighteen years ago he started his own Sebastopol business, Charles Prowell Woodworks, designing and crafting fine furniture. And he's putting up fences again. However, the fences he now designs are upscale, furniture-grade modular panels, designed and crafted as carefully as his furniture. He's well known among members of the Sonoma County Woodworkeer's Association, and to Bay Area patrons who order his furniture and gates. And his name should be familiar to readers of such magazines as Fine Woodworking, Fine Homebuilding, Woodwork and Old House Journal. His fences and furniture have also been featured in magazines such as Sunset and The English Garden. Like many professional members of the Sonoma County Woodworker's Association, Prowell has developed his fences into a production line niche market that finacially aupports the one-of-a-kind creative pieces he would prefer to concentrate on. "Sometimes," Prowell said, "I can't wait to get to the shop." When he's in his office, he is a businessman scheduling client meetings, marketing himself and updating financial records. His day usually begins early, long before his wife and sons are awake, spending from 4:30 a.m. to 7:30 a.m. at the drawing board or CAD, leaving his days free for the shop. Prowell's career over the years has followed his design interests. Currently, he's found himself enjoying the gate business. His present design for gates and fences was born several years ago while commissioned to design and build a front door for a Marin county patron. He was asked by the same patron to design an entry gateway and found himself re-thinking the old methods of gate construction. "While we were building the door, we got to thinking about the gate, about glues and joinery and weather-resistant properties for various woods and hardware. Soon we were thinking of the gate as an extension of the front door. Hence a stile & rail gate. Prowell completed this early prototype and spent the next several years, while continuiing his furniture commissions, perfecting the procedure. "The biggest breakthrough was glue. For the longerst time there were only the marine glues available, a two-part resourcinal that was expensive and toxic and required a long clamp time. There were other hurdles to overcome as well, such as wood movement--shrinking and swelling with the seasons--along with various types of joinery and, peculiar to redwood, a nagging problem of bleeding tanins. One by one the solutions came and with them, a state-of-the-art product unlike any other. There soon followed designs for complimenting fence panels, arbors and trellises. "I began to focus on promotion at this juncture. We created a web page at a time when they were fairly rare. I wrote an article for Fine Homebuilding that brought on a good response and a feature in the San Francisco Chronicle that assured me of the market." "The phone rang non-stop for a week and the web page was overwhelmed with visitors." At about the same time as the gates were ready, Prowell started to change his approach to making legs for one-of-a-kind tables. Prowell stopped using four-corner, block table legs and experimented with several tapered and formed shapes. His goal was to convey a "frail intimacy" and the development of those legs, like the gates, was a gradual evolution. "Nothing associates more with delicate sensualtiy than a ballerina when she is en pointe.," Prowell said. When people look at the legs on his tables, they should see delicate, finely balanced work, he said. whether they are the ballerina legs or the newer "foil" legs, developed for a series of walnut tables. The rest of the tables are fairly straightforward and the eye gravitates toward the legwork. The first time prowell put ballerina-style legs on a table, he was working on a glass-top table. "I thought the legs would be more visible, but as it turns out, you don't have to use glass." he said. Even with a wood table , he said, the legs are fully exposed from all angles except above the table. The table top, Prowell added, has a minimum of detail work. "You have to be careful about the sum of the details. Too many details upstage the whole. It's that first look that counts, that initial reaction to the overall balance of a piece. The details are secondary.