The cherry bench at the entrance to the Lexington Community Center. The carved bookstore cart in Cary Library's Children's Room. Two walnut tables between chairs at Fowler Branch Library in West Concord. All were built by a handful of Lexington artisans. They asked nothing for their labor.

Steve McKenna, Dick Wolk, Steve Reznek, Robert Scherzer and the late Warren Woodford (who died in February) form the core of the Lexington Woodworkers Guild, a loose collective that meets Wednesday evenings at LexArt's woodworking studio on Waltham Street. Other members drift in and out of projects, but these five built most of the pieces neighbors pass every day without knowing who made them.

The arrangement is simple: the receiving institution covers materials, which McKenna estimates at $300 or less per piece, and the guild donates all design and labor. Each finished work is inscribed "Built and donated by the Lexington Woodworkers Guild" and signed by its makers.

"It's a nice legacy," McKenna told the Lexington Observer on Thursday, Aug. 13.

McKenna, a Lexington resident who spent roughly 50 years as a union carpenter before turning to furniture-making in 2011, leads the guild's design work. His influences run through mid-century American masters Sam Maloof, George Nakashima and Wharton Esherick, but the results are shaped just as much by the wood itself and by the institutions that commission the pieces.

The Cary Library bookstore cart is a case in point. Framed in cherry with Baltic Birch plywood dividers, it replaced a sheet-metal cart the library's children's bookstore had used for years. McKenna preserved the original cash box and partition layout at the library's request, then guild members insisted on adding hand-carved basswood panels depicting a camel, duck, bird, horse and puppies. That decision extended the build by several months.

At LexArt, the gallery bench tells a different story. It was built from a large pear tree that once shaded the art center's Waltham Street property. The trunk was cut with a portable sawmill, air-dried for years under a cover McKenna built, then stored in guild member Bobbi Tornheim's shed. McKenna designed the bench around a curved branch from that tree. Steve Reznek crafted the spindles, bonding bloodwood to maple and arranging the red sections to follow the curve of the bench's back.

Reznek, a Concord resident, took up woodturning about 20 years ago after careers in physics, the EPA and Cabot Corporation. He learned the craft from longtime LexArt member Willis Hunt, who died in 2023. In a Nov. 14, 2024, interview with the Concord Bridge, Reznek described the guild's appeal: "You get lost inside your own head doing whatever you are creatively doing. It is absolutely absorbing."

The guild formally dissolved in 2023 for financial reasons, according to the Concord Bridge, but the craftsmen never stopped working together at LexArt's makerspace. Reznek still mentors woodturners there on Friday afternoons.

The guild has no active public commission at the moment. McKenna's current personal project is a pair of tables for his brother. Institutions interested in commissioning a piece can reach the group through LexArt, the nonprofit community art space at 130 Waltham St., about 500 steps from the Battle Green.