Of Teak, Yoga And Relationships -- Importer David Smith Has Built A Business Of The Things That Matter To Him

THE INDONESIANS HAVE a word for an object that possesses its own soul: Rasa hidup.

Rasa means "feeling of" and hidup (rhymes with be-boop) translates to "life."

The object in question is a teak table with the heft of a castle door, the sincerity of a picnic bench and the shimmery luster of shampooed hair.

Over the past 250 years, the table's various incarnations have weathered the rise and fall of European imperialism in Asia, the decline of hand-rolled cigarettes on the island of Java, the bite of insects, the sting of monsoons. The sturdy teak didn't merely survive last year's financial crisis in Asia. Its transformation from salvage timber to premium table helped 100 Javanese craftspeople endure the financial storm that smashed the value of Indonesian currency by 85 percent, triggered riots, killed 1,000 people and toppled the Indonesian president. The craftspeople, who work in the village workshop of Seattle importer David Smith, use only traditional methods and hand tools.

On the most recent leg of its journey, the teak table traveled by bicycle, rickshaw, container ship and an 18-wheel rig. It departed from Smith's village workshop on the island of Java in the village of Kudus in one of the world's poorest, most densely populated nations. It landed in Seattle, a wealthy wired city in the richest democracy on the planet. For a few months, the table stood on end, dissembled, in the drafty, candlelit warehouse of David Smith & Co., importer of Indonesian antiques and reproductions, a few blocks south of Lake Union.

There, it was sighted by interior designer Francois Pascal, a regular in Smith's shop, especially during Seattle's cold rain, when the Provence native seeks warm ambience and a hot cup of tea.

As soon as he saw the table, Pascal knew he wanted it. "I really like the primitive look of that furniture. The wood, it doesn't look brand new. It has a lot of defects and a lot of life. I like objects much more than design, and I like stories. I like to see a piece and dream about it and imagine stories about it, like something coming from my grandfather."

Pascal bought the table on sale for $1,950, marked down from $2,450.

A few weeks ago, the table cruised down I-5 in the back of a pickup truck, crossed Puget Sound on a ferry and then settled into the rustic Vashon Island farmhouse Pascal shares with his painter wife, Mia Dovi, and their two daughters.

If the world is still around, the table is expected to last another 250 years.

THE TABLE SEATS EIGHT, comfortably.

Its slab top is 7 feet long, 3 1/2 feet wide and 2 1/2 inches thick, a rich russet wood that feels like rippling water when you run your fingers over it. Long swirling grain marks the surface. The pattern resembles sandy shoreline on one end and the Milky Way on the other, as if there are layers of air or mist.

Actually, the tabletop is three solid boards interlocked by mortise-and-tenon joints, no nails. The wood was hand-planed on a slanted workbench in the direction of gravity and then hand-rubbed with a beeswax finish. The tabletop is inlaid with wood patches shaped like fish and butterflies and Matisse-like abstractions where the centuries have pitted its surface. In its first life, the table was a tree, a teak sapling in Burma. During the 1700s, when Dutch traders controlled the Malayan archipelago, they transplanted the tree to a plantation on the highlands of Java. By the early 1800s, the towering teak had been felled, milled into planks and raised as a cavernous gudang warehouse for a cigarette factory in Eastern Java.

If you sniff the tabletop and stretch your imagination, you can still smell the pungent scent of cloves and tobacco. At the peak of production in the mid-1800s, 1,200 women sat on small chairs amid drying tobacco leaves and piles of cloves, hand-rolling corn-husk cigarettes to be sold to rural farmers. Over the decades, the toxicity of the tobacco and the advent of mechanized cigarette-rolling machines killed off the customer base and the demand for hand-rolled, hand-tied corn-husk cigarettes. So the barn was gradually abandoned, and eventually sighted by one of David Smith's Indonesian friends.

On one of his frequent trips to Java, Smith visited the small village and had the barn dismantled and brought to the workshop along with some old benches, which would later form the table's broad trestle, and some discarded wooden rice pounders, which would be salvaged to make the table's tiered and curved pediments and feet. The design is borrowed from 15th-century monks in Northern Italy, who ate off such trestle tables in their monastery.

Even before supporting its first meal, this table is laden with history. All told, it weighs 250 pounds.

SMITH WEIGHS 145 pounds and stands 5 feet 11 inches, an elongated elf of a man topped by a striped knit cap and wrapped in a rakish cotton scarf. He has a remarkable way of moving through the maze of antique and refurbished Indonesian furniture in his chilly, 25,000-square-foot store. He appears to float - until he comes to an iron-grille wine cabinet or terra-cotta Buddha or rattan lounge or cat statuette cast from melted radiators. Then, like a balloon on a breeze, Smith bounces around the object and resumes floating.

His curious grace is likely the result of 10 years as a Seattle yoga instructor. After the yoga-teaching chapter of his life, he traveled to Asia to explore Japanese gardens, stopped by Indonesia to visit a friend and wound up bringing back a crate of rustic village furniture and Balinese beaded-denim jackets.

Ten years later, David Smith & Co. is one of the largest importers of high-end Indonesian antiques and furniture in the country. Clients include the Pottery Barn, Axis restaurant, out-of-state designers, local decorators, impulse buyers, regular browsers. In addition to the high-end antiques, custom orders and refurbished furniture, there are handmade wooden milking stools (two for $30), hand-carved wooden long beans (75 cents each), painted lotus blossoms, terra-cotta Buddhas, Javanese puppets ($54), teak benches ($145), teak dowry chests with iron hardware, rubber lawn chairs fashioned from tire treads, plank platters ($260), tiny painted stools, carved wooden panels, baskets galore, candle holders, garden furniture, dinnerware, rustic television cabinets, rattan loungers and a few antique wedding chambers with ornate screens and romantic curlicues.

"The guiding principle for me: Whatever it is that was the most interesting to me, I would pursue that. Somehow life just unfolds. It has unfolded in a way that was beyond my wildest dreams."

The son of a salesman and a Welcome Wagon lady, Smith grew up in Pennsylvania and New England, surrounded by old barns piled with forgotten furniture. Even as a young boy, he loved visiting antique dealers, climbing into the rafters and dragging down musty chests with rusty hinges. At 11, Smith bought a Pennsylvania Dutch dry sink lined with zinc for $35, spent three months cleaning and repairing it and sold it for $55 to a woman who was initially put off by all the scratches and nicks but reassured by her husband, "Oh honey, that's all part of its charm." Thus began Smith's love affair with selling antiques.

After graduating from high school in 1970, Smith traveled around the world for three years before landing in Southern California to study meditation. He moved to Seattle in 1977, delivered singing telegrams, peddled pretzels on the street for $12.50 a day plus one cent commission per pretzel and hawked brewed coffee, lemon squares and cream-cheese brownies from a cart under the Monorail. Then more travel, a bout with hepatitis in Mexico and a return to health through intense 12-hour-a-day yoga practice and study with Seattle instructor Bob Smith (no relation).

David Smith still practices yoga. "In a curious way, I think the most important thing I do in this business is yoga and meditation every evening. That, more than anything, is responsible for the success I've had. That, and treating people well and with respect and doing what you say you're going to do."

IT IS POSSIBLE to make a lot of money off Asia's emerging economies without having to actually be there. Without learning the language or the names of the people who work for you or much about their families, their religion, their craft, their history, their soul.

David Smith is, without a doubt, a savvy businessman. But he has chosen another way. He took the trouble to learn Indonesian in an intensive language program at the University of Washington. He spends about half of every year in Indonesia, motoring around the islands in an old van looking for stuff to import and hanging out with friends and craftspeople in his workshops.

"Everything there is based on relationships. I am part of their lives, and they are part of my life. The people who work with me are basing their lives on our relationship, that I'm dependable, that I'm there for the long term. There's no substitute for that."

The importer speaks of the people and their craft with deep respect. He could have bought an electric saw to cut timber for a fraction of the time and cost, but that would have put eight tukang gradji (specialized lumberjacks who split and saw beams by hand) out of work. It would have pushed traditional Javanese craft work one more step toward its demise.

Smith knows who made which table, which chair. The Italian monastery trestle table, for example, was crafted by master carpenter Suyanto, a devout Muslim grandfather who lives next to the big mosque and smokes clove cigarettes while he works. Last year, Suyanto was one of three carpenters whom Smith brought to Seattle for two months to supervise American carpenters on a project here.

Smith pays his carpenters, carvers, finishers and tukang gradji two to three times the going rate, plus bonuses. When the Indonesian economy collapsed last year and unemployment hit 30 percent, Smith held a workshop meeting to reassure his craftspeople that they would continue to have jobs, and, in fact, he was going to raise wages to keep up with inflation.

"They count on me," Smith says.

And they puzzle over Americans' buying habits.

Why do people want this rustic furniture? they ask. The old terra-cotta tiles? The used brick? For poor people?

Smith laughs. "I'm selling to rich people in America who buy new houses and want to make them look old."

Paula Bock is a staff writer for Pacific Northwest. Harley Soltes is the magazine's staff photographer. ------------------------------- David Smith & Co., 334 Boren Ave. N., Seattle. 206-223-1598. 11 a.m.-6 p.m. daily.