Three years ago, the art world lost one of its most distinctive voices when New Hope woodworker George Nakashima died at the age of 85. But owing to the dedication of his family, who continue to run the workshop he founded nearly 50 years ago, his tradition of blending a reverence for nature with the designs of furniture has not only survived but flourished.

The task of designing furniture that replicates the unusual style of Mr. Nakashima—a style that has been showcased in museums around the world—has devolved upon his daughter, Mira Nakashima-Yamall, who with her mother, Marion, and brother, Kevin, oversee the daily workings of the company compound on Aquetong Road.

The compound is an unassuming place—a hodgepodge of small buildings that include lumber sheds, workshops, and a home, and one large parabolic structure that is the company's showroom. In the show-room are displayed several examples of the coffee tables, chairs, side- boards, and lampstands that have made the Nakashima name famous.

One wall—the wall shaped like a parabola—is comprised of the delicate paper screens common to Japanese homes called "shoji" which dim the sunlight to a pale glow and lend the room an uncommon air of serenity—the serenity, it seems, of the orient.

Prices of the furniture range from a $250 stool to a $15,000 dining table, while buyers range from the wealthy to the illustrious, including Missouri Sen. James Danforth and the founder of Apple Computers, Stephen Jobs, Today the waiting list for custom-made products is three months, considerably less than the 2 1/2 years that lasted throughout the economic boom of the 1980s.

Such facts testify to the success of a man who once wrote that he regarded woodworking as a path "to our union with Divine." But success did not come easily and Marion Nakashima, now 81, vividly remembers the trials she and her husband endured before they settled in New Hope and Mr. Nakashima had a chance to devote himself full time to his vocation.

Like many Americans of Japanese ancestry, during World War II they had to spend time in internment camps, first in Portland, Oregon, and then on the barren planes of Idaho. It did not matter that both were born in Washington State, nor that Mr. Nakashima had a degree in architecture from the University of Washington.

As Mrs. Nakashima said, "It was one of those things that you didn't want to do, but you couldn't do anything about it. You felt like you were pretty well trapped."

The Nakashimas adapted as best as they could to their surroundings, and Mr. Nakashima made $19 a month applying his architectural knowledge to sprucing up the camp. It was while he was so engaged that he met another inmate, a carpenter by trade, who taught him all the finer points of woodworking, especially how to correctly sharpen a chisel—an esoteric skill without which no man can be called a true woodworker.

Mr. Nakashima returned the favor by designing furniture the carpenter could build, and together they decorated the barracks with prototypes of tables and chairs that would one day be featured in settings no less famous than the Museum of Modern Art.

Mrs. Nakashima said her husband's decision to abandon the career of an architect in favor of woodworker occurred even before they went to the internment camps, and reflected his dissatisfaction with the impersonal style of modern architecture.

"One day he saw a Frank Lloyd-Wright house under construction," she said, "and decided the whole trade of architecture was being carried on in a shoddy manner. The architect had no control of a project from beginning to end, whereas with furniture design he could participate in the whole process, whether it was drawing the designs or actually cutting and shaping the lumber."

The Nakashima family, which at the time included daughter Mira, who was less than a year old, left the internment camp in 1943 under a policy that permitted Japanese-Americans to live freely on the East Coast provided someone could give them work. In their case,this someone was Antonin Raymond of New Hope, an architect with whom Mr. Nakashima had worked in Tokyo in 1937. Upon settling in New Hope, he worked for Mr. Raymond for a year, doing general farm work, before he decided it was time to launch his own business designing and building furniture.

Kevin Nakashima used to chide him about "calling himself a woodworker, " Kevin said. "It was almost a disparaging term compared to a cabinet maker or a carpenter. But my father didn't listen to them. By calling himself a woodworker, he knew he was in a class all by himself."

In 1946 Mr. Nakashima was awarded the deed to a three-acre tract of land on Aquetong Road after he had done some construction work for the owner. There he founded his workshop and began to hone his craft, selling his product first locally and then in New York City. In 1952 he was awarded a medal for his designs by the American Institute of Architects, and from then on he was considered one of the leading furniture designers in the country.

It is not difficult to see what distinguishes Nakashirna furniture from conventional designs. In the former there is a decided emphasis on nature, more particularly the tree, in its rawest, most uncultivated state. The archetypal Nakashima coffee table is an amoeba-shaped slab of cherry or walnut, oiled to a sheen, and showing several gashes, depressions, or cavities in its surface formed by some natural accident during the life of the tree and left there as reminders of the table's organic past.

Mrs. Nakashima describes this style in terms of reincarnation.

"My husband thought that wood should have a second life," she said. "He believed a dead tree could live again if he could create something beautiful out of it He would take a piece of wood and let it tell him what to do rather than force his design upon it. It was an instinctive skill he had, an ability to establish a rapport with the wood."

The process by which Mrs. Yamall inherited her father's method of design was gradual, lasting over two decades. She too was trained an architect, graduating from Harvard in 1963 before moving to Japan to get her master's degree. But the demands of raising four children prevented her from concentrating on a career full time. In order to fulfill the professional void, she turned her attention increasingly to her father's work, and by slow degrees moved from an apprentice to a collaborator.

Today she not only continues the family tradition in terms of furniture design, but she is also working hard to fulfill her father's dream of establishing peace tables on all the major continents.

The dream stems from an enormous walnut los Mr. Nakashima received in 1985. He thought the piece of wood so beautiful that he wanted it consecrated to some special purpose. The idea of cutting the log into several giant altars for peace and distributing them throughout the world came to him strangely enough, while he was anesthetized for a gall bladder operation.

His dream was partially realized on New Year's Eve, 1986, when the first "Altar of Peace" was dedicated at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in Manhattan. Mrs. Yamall is currently in negotiation with Russian officials over installing a second peace table at the Academy of Sciences in Moscow, as well as with officials of an experimental Utopian society in India who have expressed an interest in receiving one of the tables.

Mrs. Yamall said fund-raising campaigns have been established to see that the tables are built and transported overseas.