Museum-going can be exhausting. With so much visual stimuli, even the most enthusiastic visitor experiences a kind of fatigue that attacks the eyes, the legs, and most of all, the mind.

This creates a need for temporary peace, which is one reason the Michener Museum recently installed a reading room for its visitors.

The other is to honor George Nakashima, the internationally known woodworker. who died m 1990, Nakashima's studio outside New Hope has turned out distinctive furniture for more than 40 years, for a range of clients that has included Nelson Rockefeller and the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

The new Nakashima Reading Room was designed by the artistes - daughter, Mira Nakashima-Yarnall. Since its opening July 18, the Japanese-style reading room has been drawing visitors to its soothing interior. Its furnishings, classic pieces from the Nakashima studio, include a table made from unique wood that the late artist had labeled "not for sale."

Nakashima-Yarnall, who like her father is a trained architect, says the room is intended to give museum-goers a place to relax.

"If you see too much art at one time, you get full and you need a place to empty," she says, "Bruce Katsiff, the director of the museum, had visited several museums that were up and coming, and had seen that many had only small resting places for people. He saw that a spot was needed here. And since the museum had been looking for a way to commemorate my father's work in Bucks County, this seemed a good idea."

THE READING room is part of the Michener Museum's recently completed $1.85 million, 13-month expansion. For Nakashima-Yarnall, creating the room was a chance to work not only on selection of the pieces, but on the overall design.

"I was thrilled when Bruce asked me to have a hand in not just the design, but the architecture of the room, too," says Nakashima-Yarnall. "In the Japanese room at the Metropolitan Museum, we did the furniture but not the architecture. Here, I could work on both."

It is a oneness with nature that Nakashima tried to convey in his work. The smooth, rich woods used in his furniture are as close to the originals as possible.

"The love for the nature of teak and walnut can best be obtained by working with the material; by cutting, planing, scraping and sanding the wood," reads a Nakashima quote outside the reading room. "The hours spent by the true craftsman in bringing out the grain, which has long been imprisoned in the trunk of the tree, are themselves an act of creation. He passes his hand over the satiny texture and finds God within."

Nakashima's love of nature was nurtured in the mountain forests of his birthplace near Spokane, Wash. He received architecture degrees from the University of Washington and Massachusetts Institute of Technology; then worked with an architecture firm in Tokyo.

But modern architecture disillusioned Nakashima. He decided instead to pursue woodworking as his life's work. His plans to establish a studio in Seattle were ruined by the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, Like thousands of other Japanese-American citizens, Nakashima, his wife and newborn daughter Mira were imprisoned in an internment camp. The family spent over a year in a camp in Idaho.

EMERGING IN 1943, Nakashima brought his family to New Hope through the sponsorship of Antonin Raymond, the architect he had worked for in Tokyo. He spent a year as a laborer on a chicken farm. Slowly, Nakashima began to build his woodworking shop. He started in a small garage, eventually expanding the compound to 12 buildings.

For the past few years, the Nakashima studio's main task has been the replacement of pieces owned by the Krosnick family of Princeton Township. A devastating fire destroyed their home on Stuart Road, which had been filled with custom-designed Nakashima furniture.

The replacement work completed, the Nakashima studio has returned, more or less, to business as usual. The workshop ships furniture all over the world—to Europe, South America, and most recently to Russia—and there is quite a backlog.

Since her father's death, Nakashima-Yarnall says, things have changed only slightly.

"One of the things that is different is the amount of customer involvement," she says. "With the Krosnick house, for instance, there was a lot of customer input, which I don't know that Dad allowed as much as I did. But probably, that's just a difference between myself and my father."

Nakashima-Yarnall and her younger brother grew up in the workshop, and couldn't help absorbing their father's aesthetic.

"When I was really little I used to putter around the shop with him, so I pretty much grew up around it," she says. "I actually didn't work in the shop until I was in high school. After college, I lived in Japan for three years, and then in Pittsburgh where I raised my children. Then I came back here."

BEING AWAY from home, Nakashima-Yarnall adds, gave her a new appreciation of her father.

"I didn't really have a perspective on my father's work until coming back from Japan," she says. "I was too close to it. This was just home. I got away and realized we were something special."

The shop continues to produce furniture from classic Nakashima designs, and more.

"These designs remain unchanged," Nakashima's daughter says, "But when my father designing there were many evolutions, and I'm continuing the into the future. We've been doing a lot more cabinet work and custom tables, and I feel they are excellent pieces. Sometimes they are even nicer than the ones from when my father was here, because he did such a volume of orders that not as much care was always taken in the design and selection of woods."

In the Nakashima Reading Room, traditional Japanese architectural elements are blended with some contemporary modifications. Conoid lounge chairs were originally made for a Japanese architect in 1980, then redesigned for longer-legged Americans when the Japanese Reading Room was installed at the Metropolitan Museum in 1986. Like the chairs that surround it, the coffee table is made of special Claro Walnut.

"The one thing that was important to me in this was that the coffee table be a very spectacular piece of walnut burl," Nakashima-Yarnall says. "It was the last piece of wood my father had marked not for sale, and I thought this should be used to make a memorial for him. The rest kind of evolved. We did the walls like a tearoom, not totally traditional but as an attempt at tradition."

Window screens, called "shoji," are made of aromatic Alaska Cedar. The main post at the corner of the window walls is called a "Mother Post" in Japanese architecture. It cane from the woods near the Nakashima studio. The post is a functioning structural element that actually holds up a corner of the building.

During the opening of the room a few weeks ago, it was full the entire time, says Nakashima-Yarnall. "And the museum staff tells me that whenever they get stressed out, they go to empty out in there. So it works."