If a tree falls on Martha’s Vineyard, Zach Pinerio will probably hear about it. As the owner and artist behind Chappaquiddick Wood Company, he is always on the lookout for trees that could make good bowls. So when he gets a call from an arborist telling him that a suitable tree is being taken down, he drops everything to collect the tree before it gets thrown out.

Turning a tree into a set of finished products is a long and intimate process that takes several months. Pinerio’s primary choices of wood are maple, cherry, and ash, which dry well and are easy to sand. He sources white ash from West Tisbury, while sycamore maples come primarily from downtown Edgartown. He occasionally works with white oak, too, mostly for cutting boards. But black oak, which is common on Martha’s Vineyard, is porous and tends to split when cut into bowls and dried in the kiln.

After Pinerio takes possession of a tree, he transports it to his studio on Chappaquiddick. He runs each log through his sawmill, cutting it lengthwise, then uses a lathe to cut rough versions of bowls that are thicker than the final product. Doing it this way gives the bowls room to move and shrink as they dry in a kiln housed in a shipping container outside his studio. The entire drying process takes six to eight weeks. Pinerio has added sensors and additional thermostats to control the environment inside, which is brought up to 90 degrees to draw the moisture from the bowls. 

“The kiln-drying portion is its own science. It’s what makes this whole thing work,” he explained. “You’re trying to trick the kiln into doing its job, but on a much slower scale – and kilns are made to dry fast.”

He typically times his work with the rhythms of the season. He collects wood throughout the year, milling the logs in January and February. Once he has around 200 to 300 bowls, he loads up the kiln. He likes to do this in March, so that he can leave the Island during the dreary early-spring season while the kiln is doing its work. Once the bowls are dry, the wood is stable enough to be put back on the lathe to refine the final shape of the bowls. He sands each one to give it a smooth finish, revealing the wood’s grain. 

Pinerio first learned the art of the lathe more than a decade ago while living in Vermont, where he worked with well-known woodworker and bowl maker Andrew Pearce. He had also previously worked on cabinet making and historic restoration. Pinerio was drawn to work on the lathe because it allowed him to be involved in every step of the process. “It’s one of the only woodworking processes where you can go from tree to final product,” he said. “If I were to make a table, I would probably buy planks, that kind of thing. For wood turning, you have to mill your own wood.”

It takes him roughly one hour to shape and sand each bowl, which he then finishes with walnut oil. The bowls will keep their shape and look as long as they are kept out of the dishwasher and microwave, he explained. It’s time-consuming and delicate work. If a bowl cracks or he cuts too much and creates a hole, the bowls become expensive firewood.

“At the beginning it was very challenging to deal with, because it’s so much work, you’ve got hundreds of hours already committed,” he said. “I’ve gotten better over time. You either get really good at not [messing] it up or you don’t become a wood turner.”

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Pinerio didn’t set out to become a professional bowl maker. Instead, his hobby over time became a business. In 2015 he decidedto move to Chappaquiddick, where he grew up summering. He brought the kiln with him. 

Four years later, his need for wood increasing, he bought a sawmill with friend Collins Heavener, who uses it for furniture making at his Marshall Farm Wood-Works company, also on Chappaquiddick. Pinerio said the purchase changed his life because of how much time it saves – a sawmill goes through logs at a much higher rate than doing it by hand. 

For a while, he sold bowls wholesale but stopped doing so because the amount of wood he gets fluctuates every year. Now, he sells his products at Sea Legs (a boutique in Edgartown that he co-owns with his wife, Grace Romanowsky), at the Edgartown Village Market in the summer, and at various off-season events, such as the Holiday Faire during Christmas in Edgartown. Bowls can also be purchased on his website, chappaquiddickwoodcompany.com.
      
While most of the tree goes toward making his signature bowls, Pinerio makes sure that the offcuts of wood don’t go to waste by creating and selling coasters, cutting boards, salad servers, and other wood products. In addition to these ready-made items, Pinerio also takes custom orders, some of which come from homeowners who want to memorialize a tree that had to be removed from their family property. 

“There’s a lot of people that have had trees that have been in their family for generations – like their grandfather was here, bought the property or planted it – and now the grandkids are having that tree made into a bowl,” he said. 

Pinerio also receives a lot of custom orders related to weddings, since the bowls make popular gifts for newlyweds and their families. In the past, for instance, he has given the mothers on either side of the family wedding bowls that were made from the same tree.

Because bowls are everyday items, Pinerio’s work allows people to bring special memories into their everyday lives. His creations also allow the recipients to remain connected to the Vineyard when they are away. “Anybody can make a bowl, if you take enough time and energy. What makes them interesting, and what makes people specifically out here want to buy them, is that they are from the Vineyard,” he said. 

As for Pinerio’s own connection to the land and the work, he said that because he handles the wood for each bowl a number of times, from when it is freshly felled to the final finish, he is able to recognize where each bowl comes from by sight. “It becomes kind of intimate. I am involved in all of these at every stage,” he said. “I can tell you where all the trees are from. There are some trees that I can tell you what house they came from, or what street they came from.”

He pointed to a small bowl with a grain wave across the bottom in a large pile next to the lathe in his studio. That one came from a black walnut tree – a rarity on the Vineyard – on Skiff Avenue in Vineyard Haven, he said. 

He also sees a wider history of the Island through the wood. “There was a hurricane in the thirties that basically knocked down many of the trees…. All of the sycamore maples were planted directly after that, so it makes them all around eighty years old,” he explained. “In that way, you can trace the history of the Island.”

He sees that history, and sense of longevity, as part of what makes his products special. As a family uses a bowl, the story of that object will change and evolve from just being about the tree to being about the family that purchased it. 

“If somebody got it from their parents, knowing that they used it most of their life, and then they make dinner with their kids out of the same bowl – and that bowl is from a piece of property on the Vineyard – that’s awesome,” Pinerio said.