Greg Klassen and his family travel for art install
EVERSON — An Everson man, Greg Klassen creates art. He does not produce it.
“I am one man,” Klassen states. “I am not a company. I am a husband, a father and an artist.”
Klassen is the one person who makes what is known as river tables, which resemble a literal visual representation of a river with one-quarter-thick glass in the midst of the uniquely formed table.
He has also branched into other furniture and artwork using wood. Klassen answers the mail and the phone, takes the orders and looks for the salvaged wood from local and other sources.
From an unassuming farm outside of Everson, Klassen has a treehouse, a large garden and a large workshop for his artistic wood-working home business. Many in the community may not realize who he is, but his work has been featured in Sunset, Home & Design Trends, Portland Monthly, Gray, Western Art & Architecture, Seattle, Fine Woodworking, Decor Magazine, Colossal: Art, Design, and Visual Culture, and more.
Clients of Klassen have been beyond the boundaries of Whatcom County for a long time, but this fall that honor has now grown to include an international client who not only wanted the piece but for the artist to come for the installation – and bring his family.
In an interview with Martha Stewart on the process by which he works, Klassen said his inspiration “comes from the beautiful Pacific Northwest and the trees that grow here. No two trees are the same, just as no two pieces are that I make from them.”
Klassen creates because he loves to create.
“It’s so much fun and a pleasure to go to work,” he said. “My pieces are handmade, in the truest sense of the word.”
Klassen said he makes one piece at a time and “give it my full attention, starting with a tree and ending up with functional art. I love the idea of taking a discarded tree and giving it new life.”
Klassen studied theology in college, then started into art and furniture making in 2008. The starving art years were followed by developing his own original designs and with a bit of marketing and a strong social media presence on Facebook and Instagram, “Seemingly overnight in the summer of 2014 I became a viral internet sensation,” he said. “My work was immediately seen by tens of millions of people in every corner of the globe.”
Klassen’s work made its way to magazines in India, Germany and Brazil. He stopped piling his family into the car to travel to arts festivals, and then could work from orders coming online through his website. At one point, one commission came from a royal family member, a prince, who wished to keep his identity private.
Over the summer, Klassen created his largest-ever river table, a 15-foot dining table that extends to 20 feet long, he said.
“This was a dream project for me,” he said. “It started with an Instagram message from a woman in Greece who followed my work.”
After spending most of summer 2024 working on this project, Klassen packed the table into an extra-long custom-built 16-foot-long shipping crate to Greece in late August. It left Whatcom County for SeaTac Airport and was loaded onto a cargo plane for Athens – with a stop in Luxembourg.
“The table shipped on an air freighter that specializes in shipping large artwork and high-precision machinery,” he said.
That wasn’t the end of the project: Klassen’s client invited him and his family to personally install the table onsite. In Greece.
“We’ve had many opportunities to personally deliver my work, but we’ve never flown across the globe to do it,” Klassen said. “The table passed through customs in Athens and waited for our arrival six weeks later.”
So Klassen, his wife Barbara and their children, 16-year-old Ruth, 14-year-old Beatrice and 11-year-old Oliver, traveled to Greece. Once they arrived, the family spent the first two days in scenic Meteora, which is renowned for its spectacular landscapes of Byzantine monasteries perched atop steep, towering rocks. They had noticed it, he said, from seeing it on the cover of a Greek travel book. The following five days saw them get to work in the northwestern Greece village of Papingo where the table would live.
“Arriving in Papingo it felt like we had stepped into a fairytale illustration, arriving in a village of small stone houses with stone tile roofs, draped in beautiful vines holding bunches of tasty, green grapes,” Klassen said. “The roads here were also stone and built before the invention of automobiles, with some of the roads so narrow, we had to retract the mirrors on our rental car to fit through.”
On the first day there, as they stayed in a 330-year-old stone home built by Ottoman Turks, Klassen found help with the table for his client.
“We had the help of a dozen Greek men to lift it out of the crate and into place,” he said. “The men knew just enough English to make it work and my daughter Beatrice snapped photos throughout the illustration.”
Once the work was done, the Klassen family was free to hike, raft, horseback ride and make new friends, and eat dinner at the local tavernas, Greek for small restaurant. They took a 90-minute ferry ride to the island of Corfu and “were greeted by two imposing Venetian fortresses and an old city full of character,” he said.
Since Klassen makes his living working with trees, he was delighted to discover a 1,500-year-old Olive tree called Mitera, or Mother. It had been created by grafting, or mothering, onto other trees. The client treated them to a tour of Athens, which brought views of the Acropolis, Parthenon and Ancient Agora and plenty of museums before they had to return.
As they walked through the historic locations, Klassen recalled his theological training: “We walked in the footsteps of Apostle Paul and read his words in Acts from atop Mars Hill in Athens and also in Ancient Corinth.”
“It was the ultimate homeschool history trip. Just before the trip, one of my kids had a school assignment to learn about Greek geography,” he said. “What better way to really learn it than to just go there? “
Do the kids want to go back? “Well, there’s already talks about where we should go next and whether it should be England or Japan. Perhaps we’ll get lucky, and another customer will reach out and ask for the Klassen Family Table Installation Package.
As they left, Klassen said the client invited them to visit once a year.