From the Fall 2012 Music Issue of Anthology magazine

Chris Kamaka can’t remember a day without the ukulele. For the past two decades, he has overseen production at Kamaka Hawaii, the oldest ukulele factory on the islands; before that, he worked in just about every position on the factory line. Founded by his grandfather, Sam Kamaka, Sr., the company has made beautiful handmade instruments from native Hawaiian koa wood since 1916. So inextricable is his family history from the history of the classic four-string that “Kamaka” is virtually synonymous with “the best-made ukuleles in the world.” After a lifetime spent crafting the instruments, Chris still gets unexpected joy from the process.

“Every once in a while, I find one where the wood is extra beautiful or the sound is really special, and I think, ‘Wow, these guys are lucky to get this one,’” he says with a laugh, in the back office near where he strums and screens every ukulele for quality before it is sent out. “Usually it’s for the rock stars — or the wannabe rock stars.”

The ukulele has lately seen something of a global revival, and the venerable company — now run by a third generation of Kamaka boys that includes Chris and his cousin, Fred Jr. — is busier than ever. Sure signs of a cultural tipping point into a new pool of fans: when your instruments are played in prominent fashion by Eddie Vedder (in his latest album, Ukulele Songs) and the cast members of Glee (in the season one finale), all in the same year.

You’ll find Kamaka Hawaii right in downtown Honolulu, behind an unassuming little storefront near the harbor. Four days a week, visitors can enter the two-floor workshop and “talk story” their way around with 87-year-old Fred Sr. — Chris’ uncle — as guide. As the elder Fred describes the cultural history of the diminutive piece of Hawaiiana, he plucks at a hand=painted 1928 pineapple ukulele; so called for its unique shape, the pineapple model became Kamaka’s signature. Its sound — feathery, yet full — is altogether joyous.

The ukulele’s precursor, the four-stringed braginho, was introduced to the Hawaiian islands in the late 1800s by Portuguese laborers who came to work the sugar plantations. Natives renamed it the ukulele, Hawaiian for “jumping fle,” suggesting the dancing motion of a strumming hand. By 1916, several local craftsmen, including Sam Kamaka, Sr., had set up shop.

These days, each Kamaka uke starts as a piece of rough-hewn koa lumber from the Big Island, aged at least four years in the shade to avoid cracking and warping. Stacks of the prized material sit air-drying at the back of the factory under lock and key. After his front-of-the-house tutorial, Fred Sr. takes visitors around to the sawdust-strewn workshop, where artisans cut, bend, and glue pieces of koa into shape for each ukulele body.

Though the process is greatly streamlined by modern innovations — specially designed machines have shortened the time it takes to cut and bend the wood, and perform the tasks with more accuracy — the basics remain the same after a century. At one workstation, craftsmen carefully “book-match” the wood, resulting in the signature symmetrical grain pattern that butterflies out from the center of each ukulele. At other stations, they attach frets, fingerboards, bridges, and necks.

The process of sanding and lacquering is as painstaking as ever; most ukuleles receive five or six coats of lacquer. The time-intensive process ensures a long-lived instrument and a warm, gleaming finish that sets off the beauty of the koa grain.

After the strings and keys are placed, the ukes sit on a rack waiting for personal attention from Chris. Chris, who is a local musician — a member of the Grammy-nominated band Ko’okena — spends the bulk of his workdays testing the ukes before they are shipped out. Notes drift out from the upstairs portion fo the shop as he tests for sound and catches any imperfections.

Part of the ukulele’s charm is that it is one of the easiest instruments to play, with a relaxed intimacy that has made its influence known far and wide beyond Hawaii and America. And it travels well. Kamaka customers past and present include everyone from George Harrison and Ziggy Marley to ukulele wunderkind Jake Shimabukuro (Kamaka makes a special line of Jake-specific models).

The historic pineapple ukulele displayed in the shop gets a lot of admirers, and Fred Sr. laughs at the idea that it should be hidden away. “My wife says, ‘You gotta lock that up — it’s priceless!’” he says, picking up the uke and plucking its strings affectionately. “But I say, ‘I gotta play it every day.’”

Bonnie Tsui will be a speaker at the Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism on November 10, 2012 for East Meets West, which brings together top editors from the East Coast and the West, as well as an audience of 60 talented, veteran writers. The all-day event will be one long conversation about the tradition and the edges of narrative journalism, and will explore how to research and write great stories, where to publish them, and how to collaborate with agents and editors. There will be keynotes, lectures, and practical workshops.

Bonnie Tsui talks with Jason Margolis of The World on the evolution of Chinatowns. Listen to the story here.

Bonnie Tsui takes All Things Considered host Rebecca Sheir on a walk around New York’s Chinatown, and discusses the changing face of America’s historic neighborhoods. Listen to the story here.

November 9, 2011, at Davies Symphony Hall in San Francisco. Stories, documentary films, interviews, photography, facts, and radio, LIVE ON STAGE. ArtsJournal: “Bonnie Tsui’s profile piece about a guy who made a career out of diving for urchins in the waters around the shark-infested Farallon Islands before retiring and launching a new career filming underwater life for scientific researchers, provided perhaps the most engaging example of how a piece of journalism can make the most of the live experience.” Check it out here.

View the slideshow at Smithsonian magazine.

Tiny, little-known Lago d’Orta—just a mile wide, it lies to the west of Maggiore—is a sleepy European summertime destination, its forested shores peppered with stone-walled medieval villages. But hidden away at the northern end of the lake, above the town of Omegna and its gritty industrial zone, is a temple to modern international design: the Alessi factory.

In 1921, a skilled metalsmith named Giovanni Alessi set up shop here, in an area with a long history of quality wood and metal handicraft. Throughout the 1920s and ’30s, the family workshop turned out traditional items for the table and home—coffeepots, bowls, trays, tongs—in copper, brass, and nickel silver.

In the decades since, the company “lab” has married these traditions with forward-thinking ideas, in collaborations with hundreds of international independent designers. Even the most casual observer of housewares will recognize familiar items from the Alessi catalog: an early and classic coffee-shop creamer; a corkscrew with a cutout face, by Alessandro Mendini; a spidery lemon squeezer, by Philippe Starck; a pair of playful salt and pepper shakers with magnetized feet, by Stefano Giovannoni.

Alessi doesn’t employ in-house designers, preferring that its creative partners have minds that stay “free.” Scion Alberto Alessi—the grandson of Giovanni, he is the third generation to join the family business—says this is in keeping with “a long chain” of Italian industrial design tradition. What the company does have is an in-house dream team of technical engineers, each specializing in a particular material, who help bring the designs to physical reality.

In the heat of Italian summer, I made a pilgrimage to the factory to find out a bit more of the backstory from Alberto Alessi himself, and from the factory and museum’s historic archive of archetypal housewares. A giant model of the famous Bombé teapot, designed by Alberto’s father, Carlo, in 1945, marks the turnoff from the road. This is the only place where you can view the complete range of the company’s products—many of which reside in the permanent collections at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, Centre Pompidou, the Victoria & Albert Museum, the Smithsonian Institution and the Metropolitan Museum of Art—and purchase from the entire current catalog, on display in the enormous factory shop.

“Our job is to be a mediator between the best expressions of creativity and product design and people’s dreams,” Alberto tells me during a chat in his cool, dim office, its long tables cluttered with books and papers and prototypes sent to him from aspiring designers. “That’s why I use the term ‘dream factory’ to talk about what we do.” When Alberto came to the company in the summer of 1970, he became interested in the relationship between people and objects—and in the creation of functional pieces with a point of view, appealing in other, more profound senses than functionality.

Many Alessi products are creations of top American designers. The whimsical Alessi bird whistle tea kettle, designed by architect Michael Graves in 1985, is the company’s best-selling item of all time. But when Alessi first approached Graves in 1979, he was a well-known architect who had never before done product design.

The company invited a number of notable architects to work on a brainstorming project called the “Tea and Coffee Piazza”: examining the classic pieces of the coffee and tea service—the teapot, coffeepot, sugar bowl, tray and creamer—as a kind of town square, with the pieces as architectural elements. As a result, 11 limited-edition silver services were produced under the Officina Alessi brand, each bearing the designer’s monogram. The project earned Alessi a new respect in the design world, and two of those architects—Graves and Aldo Rossi—were key design discoveries for Alessi, going on to create iconic kettles, coffee presses and many other items.

The best designers in history, Alberto tells me, have always been architects. Graves, of course, is now a home design authority with a line for Target and countless products for Alessi. Alberto explains that the Alessi method of external collaboration is nothing new—“it’s how Italian design factories have worked for many decades”—but he believes that it is a manner of working that has been lost in today’s industrial design world.

“The door of industry, unfortunately, is now more closed than it was,” Alberto says. “We still try to be a kind of research workshop in the field of applied arts, open to many different influences and collaborations. But we are the last link in a long chain.”

Frank Gehry, Richard Meier and Morphosis studio are all key American design figures who have collaborated with Alessi; of course, non-Americans like Aldo Rossi have also shaped contemporary design through their work for Alessi (Rossi’s conical coffee maker was a design stamp of the 1980s). Alessi conducts four to five workshops a year with schools, and recently concluded a project with Michigan’s Cranbrook Academy of Art. Five metalsmithing products from young designers were selected for manufacture in the coming year. “We chose a perforated basket, a flower vase, a fruit holder, a cake stand, and a banana holder.” He pauses, looking quizzical. “There were a lot of students who chose to make banana holders. I think the banana holder must be a very American thing?”

Though there might not be any banana holders yet in the Alessi oeuvre on display at the Museo Alessi, there seems to be just about everything else. Curator Francesca Appiani and team oversee all aspects of the museum, including its collection of prototypes, back-cataloged products and rare graphic pieces that recount the history of Alessi’s cultural identity; Appiani also organizes exhibitions, publications and visits by appointment. The collection is a cross-section of design over the years: a buoyant, eclectic visual history of how the design company and its global collaborators have imagined life in the home. In a testament to its continuing influence, Alessi has pieces in more permanent museum collections than any other design company.

Assistant curator Stefania Ferrari shows me prototypes of a signature 1950s cocktail shaker by design master Carlo Mazzeri, one of the company’s first external collaborators. The shaker has a pleasing, curvy shape, and the chrome-plated brass gives it a nice heft when I hold it in my hand. Appiani tells me that the collaboration with Mazzeri happened quite by accident—at the time, Mazzeri was on site to help expand the Alessi factory. But the cocktail shaker he created became a design icon, today a familiar staple of bartenders all around the world.

Company archives and museums are something of an Italian phenomenon—prominent Italian companies including Alfa Romeo, Barilla, Ferragamo and Peroni all have their own, and there is even an association for them, called Museimpresa. But Appiani tells me that Museo Alessi is its own animal even within the category, a “touchable collection for design students and design addicts” that is open to the public by appointment. It is also a living archive—designers working with Alessi often come to probe through various products to hone in on the materials they’d like to use, and to decide if a solution is possible or not.

“To have a piece in the hand, an object—this is by far the best way to explain a design concept,” Appiani says. “And because everything is organized by typology, you can see the evolution of a product over time. It’s very special.” When I browse the rolling shelves of the museum myself, I marvel at the sheer diversity of objects that have been designed for the company. But I also take note of a kind of exuberance that unites them—a visit to the collection is a unique, simultaneously large- and small-scale viewing of the company’s history and design that would be very difficult to get otherwise. In fact, Alberto tells me that his job is not unlike that of a music organizer or a gallery curator: “I collect and I coordinate.”

When I get up to leave at the end of our visit, he stops me. “Wait—I want to perform a test on you,” he says, rummaging around behind his desk for a moment. “Hold out your hand.” On the tip of my index finger, he places a large, swooping white aluminum dragonfly with outstretched wings; it has been designed so that all of the weight rests on a single point. The dragonfly sways from one side to the other when I move my hand around, but it balances perfectly on my finger.

“It works!” he exclaims, and chuckles. “A couple of young Italian designers brought it by and I just wanted to see if it worked.” We place it back on its wooden pedestal, where it settles, elegantly teetering. There is something simple and joyous about the sculpture that I like very much, and I tell him so.

“You like it?” he asks, smiling. There’s a light in his eye. “I like it, too.” Later, over e-mail, he tells me that the dragonfly will enter the Alessi catalog next year.

Bonnie Tsui is a new correspondent for Phaidon Press, the London-based publisher of noted art, architecture, food, and design books. Read her review of “How Wine Became Modern“ at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.