BY JO WERNE
UNFINISHED BUSINESS: Barry Massin relaxes next to a pile of wood he has collected.
Barry Massin takes what nature has destroyed and creates beautiful furniture.
From hundreds of trees trashed by Hurricane Andrew in 1992 — many of them Dade County pine — Massin makes tables, benches, sideboards, mantels and cabinets. An industrial artist, craftsman and environmentalist, Massin, 63, crafts such pieces on commission from friends and clients.
His home in Pinecrest, which he shares with wife Frandee, is filled with his creations. Most impressive is a sofa table made from one Dade County pine board 9 feet long, 26 ½ inches wide and three inches thick. It weighs 300 pounds and rests on a thick center block of wood. Massin used no nails in the construction.
Massin also crafted a tall kitchen cabinet from Dade County pine making the doors from a single board.
”I have a major collection of stumps,” he says while showing visitors around his one-acre property strewn with piles of logs and machinery, tools and salvaged indigenous materials. “I make furniture from them.”
Residents all over South Miami-Dade called Massin to beg him to remove their felled trees after Andrew. ”From 50 to 100 trees per acre went down to zero in this [Pinecrest] neighborhood,” he recalls, pointing out his Wood Mizer portable band saw mill.
”I ran it for seven years after Andrew,” he says. “I cut between 2,500 and 3,000 logs.”
Besides the native pine, Massin salvaged mahogany, bischofia, live oak, tropical almond and palms of all types. One Andrew casualty, a jackfruit that had been planted by David Fairchild at The Kampong, was turned into a handsome, rustic bench/shelf for interior designer Jackie Yde and her husband, Al Alschuler. ”It is much commented on by our guests,” Alschuler says.
Massin also works in metal and stone. One of his amusing metal pieces is a samurai helmet fashioned from screws, a tractor plow and odds and ends.
His garden is an unruly jungle with meandering paths, piles of logs, salvaged machinery and many ”volunteer” trees and plants.
There’s also a rectangular trench showing South Florida underground. ”I’m a materials freak and an ethno ecological wannabe,” he says. Massin went underground through an acre-size lake he has been digging for several years on eight acres in The Redland. Massin plans to build a Cracker-style house overlooking the lake.
”We outgrew this house years ago,” Massin says of the 1950s home where he and Frandee (she’s the registrar at Palmetto Senior High School) have lived for 35 years.
To dig the lake he bought a second-hand hydraulic excavator.
When he dug into the ground he discovered oolitic limestone that he slices in squares to use as flooring or as a wall surface. ”It has air holes so it’s a natural ventilator,” he explains.
The limestone sits on the Biscayne Aquifer. He had dug just three feet when clear water began filling up the hole. He found an abundance of coral, conch and sand dollars during the dig. Encrusted with millions of years of fossilized materials, they are piled in baskets and pots in the garden.
Massin, who earned a degree in industrial art from the University of Miami, taught shop in public schools, then started a repair and restoration service for artists. Over time, he morphed into a wood craftsman.
One of his major projects was building an addition to his parents’ 1912 house in Coconut Grove in 1995. ”It took 700 trees to supply the wood,” Massin recalls.
For years he worked in a large studio behind his parents’ house until it burned down. Now it’s his own backyard that is the scene of his creativity.
