Think back to those days when you were young enough to want your family members to wake up so they could play with you.
For Charles (known to many as Chuck) Burleigh it was frustrating waiting for his sleeping-late parents to rise and shine, but he coped, somehow. “I was stuck in my bedroom and was always making stuff, so what could I do but re-arrange furniture?” he recalls.
Those early mornings in Winchester, Massachusetts — in a household Burleigh describes as “a family of artists and artisans: gilders, painters, ceramicists, weavers, silversmiths, fashion designers and clock makers” — proved to become a conduit to Burleigh’s professional life as an interior decorator. The career path for Burleigh, who lives in Cold Spring, was pretty well laid out.
“My mother was very artistic and creative, and I was intrigued by what she came up with,” he says. “I thought of going into architecture, but found it had too much math. So I shifted to interior design,” enrolling in a three-year program at the Parsons School of Design in New York City.
Burleigh has an acute memory of some of the early projects he was assigned. “We were to locate things in nature or in a built environment and find parallels to them in the other,” he says. “In our later years, it was all studio classes in drawing and design. We could design an interior for a locomotive, create an interior and a site plan for an apartment, or design a record player.
“The drawing class taught drafting and rendering, which were easy for me because I had taken three years of drafting in high school, and in junior high, too, because it was a prerequisite for an architectural drawing class I wanted to take.”
At home he had already “created model houses, had drawn up floor plans, taken a lot of photographs and designed interiors,” he says. “By the time I went to Parsons, I already knew a lot.”
After graduating, Burleigh found work at design firms, where “all I did was draft,” he recalls. “There was no CAD [computer-aided design]. Now, no one does hand drafting; I do it occasionally.”
It was a time of hearing lots of critiques and comments, and, with them, the rookie’s inevitable concern that he was “not equipped to do what I was meant to. I could have a sense of what the client might want, but at that point I’m designing for the boss, which is about what the boss might do for my client, not what I would do for my client.
“I had almost a rude awakening when I realized I needed to present the design scheme to the client and that had to include coming up with a rationale for what I was showing.”
For two decades, Burleigh took corporate assignments, usually from architecture firms who wanted office interiors. “It never occurred to me that I would want to do residential design,” he says. “Two nice apartment projects landed in my lap, and I thought ‘I’ll try’ and found I enjoyed working for myself.”
He began doing that after being laid off. “I essentially had my own firm,” he says. “I didn’t want the commitment of hiring staff.” He worked on his own for eight years, until 9/11, then worked as a design director for a classical architect, then went off on his own again.
Working with clients means taking a judicious view of trends. “I always like working with what’s new and interesting, so I’m happy looking at things that are trendy,” he says. “But it’s a fine line that I walk: You want to steer them from selections they might regret.”
In 2002, Burleigh and his husband, Lithgow Osborne, moved from New York City to the lower Hudson Valley. (They now live in Cold Spring, and Burleigh has a basement studio on Main Street.)
“Corporate work offered no avenue for individual creativity,” Burleigh explains. “I had never fabricated objects for my clients. I showed them furniture, lighting, rugs and wallpaper, but none of my own making. Here, with plenty of daylight in the garage, and an office, I could try ideas out; making papier maché wasp-nest lighting fixtures was one. I’m most relaxed when working with my hands.”
Burleigh has done a lot of pro bono work at Manitoga, the nonprofit home and studio in Garrison of the late industrial designer Russel Wright. A former board member there, Burleigh has restored and recreated a number of items, including a summer chandelier based on photos that appeared in LIFE Magazine, and a sliding butterfly panel.
When he began to explore pottery and needed tutelage, he turned to Lisa Knaus, who runs the ceramic studio at the Garrison Art Center. “I kept hearing: ‘Lisa will tell you what to do.’ ” So he signed up for a class. “Somebody handed me a ball of clay, and that’s how all the work I’m doing now started,” he says.
His most recent pieces are sculptures. “I call them bowls, but they’re not functional,” he says. “The edges are quite delicate and fragile. If you get porcelain really thin, it can be translucent.” Burleigh fires and glazes his pieces at Newburgh Pottery, where he is a member.
“My goal is to sell them, primarily because I want to keep making them,” he says. “I like getting them out into the world for people to enjoy.” He will have a booth at the Garrison Craft Fair on Garrison’s Landing on Saturday (Sept. 30) and Sunday, and he’s hoping to bring his entire inventory.
“I find making bowls is relaxing,” says Burleigh, who will leave soon for Haystack, in Maine, for a two-week residency. “I get lost and my mind shuts off. I can’t look at them too much; I need to stop and let it be whatever it is. Having done creative work for so long, I get an inner response, and when my head is clear, it’s done.”
For more of Burleigh’s work, see charlesburleigh.com.
