While many furniture-building courses tend to follow architect Louis Sullivan’s famous maxim that form should follow function, furniture designer Sabiha Mujtaba has different ideas, which she looks forward to sharing with students at the Port Townsend School of Woodworking later this month.

Her five-day course, entitled simply “Design and Build a Stool or Side Table,” is more ambitious than one might suspect from its name, since she aims to inspire her students to use calligraphy — the characters from Chinese, Sanskrit, Arabic and Japanese scripts — as a guide in creating what might otherwise be utilitarian pieces of furniture.

Mujtaba comes to Port Townsend from Atlanta, Georgia, where she met Seth Rolland, himself a furniture designer and a guest instructor at the Port Townsend School of Woodworking.

Mujtaba was teaching a class in bending wood, which Rolland appreciated so much that the two professionals stayed in touch over the years, as Rolland attempted to recruit Mujtaba into teaching a class at the Port Townsend school.

This almost came to pass just prior to COVID, but the schedules didn’t work out again until Mujtaba became available to teach at the Port Townsend school from Aug. 19-23, from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. that Monday through Friday, in Building 304 at Fort Worden State Park.

Although this will mark Mujtaba’s first time to Port Townsend, she’s no stranger to the Pacific Northwest, having visited Seattle years before. She eagerly anticipates experiencing its “beautiful scenery,” enough that she’s extending her visit “a few days” beyond her course.

Mujtaba formed Chrysalis Woodworks in 1986, and teaches woodworking classes at Highland Woodworking in Atlanta, but she’s also taught at other crafts schools across the country, in addition to designing and making custom wood furniture and installations for clients well beyond Georgia.

Ten years ago, Mujtaba made a key artistic contribution to the Marian chapel of the All Saints Church in Knoxville, Tennessee, creating a hand-carved wooden retablo on the altar, a triptych with the main central panel depicting Our Lady of Guadalupe, patroness of the Americas, flanked on the sides by the Virgin Mary, as a young mother and an older Mother.

As a student in London, before she came to America, Mujtaba attended a college affiliated with a trade school that gave art students opportunities to take courses in subjects including bricklaying, welding and woodworking, all of which she enjoyed.

Furniture-maker Judy McKie was an early influence on Mujtaba, not only as the first woman woodworker she’d seen, but also because of the organic quality of McKie’s pieces, which helped direct Mujtaba to develop her own style when a job opportunity led her to become a woodworker in Atlanta, rather than a sculptor staying in England.

Mujtaba’s apprenticeship of “a few years” at Sutherland Studios caused her to fall in love with the grain, patterns and “physicality” of wood itself. In her course at the Port Townsend School of Woodworking, she’ll ensure that her students get to know the wood, by starting them on unfinished pieces of wood that haven’t yet been “ready-made” for furniture-making.

“They’ll need to figure out how to use the wood, but they’ll only have one day to figure it out,” Mujtaba said. “I want each individual to come up with their own ideas.”

Likewise, rather than her students feeling restricted by the ostensible purpose of the objects they’ll be creating — “People always think a chair or a table needs to have four legs and a surface to set things on” — Mujtaba hopes her students will emulate the ambitious lines and design elements of calligraphy brush strokes, to make them “more dramatic and powerful.”

Mujtaba added, “I want students to be truly creative, rather than just putting things together in an identical fashion. If you’re creating something, it should intrigue you, as you transform and reconfigure the material you’re working with.”

Mujtaba credited her students’ experimentalism with teaching her, just as she teaches them.

“Design and Build a Stool or Side Table,” costs $895, with a materials cost of $50, and is limited to 10 students, so those who are interested can register at ptwoodschool.org/design-and-build-a-stool-or-side-table online.