Art Espenet Carpenter, a self-taught woodworker whose spare but sexy furniture received national acclaim and influenced generations of master craftsmen, has died at age 86.

Carpenter suffered a fatal heart attack Thursday at his home in Bolinas, said his son, Tripp Carpenter.

Carpenter helped make the Marin County town a haven for artists after a house he spent eight years building and furnishing was featured in Life magazine in 1966.

”He didn’t like any of the furniture he had seen in his life, and he thought he could make something better and more beautiful,” Carpenter’s son said of the eye-catching designs his father started turning out after World War II. ”I think that was a freedom for him, not having any training, starting from scratch.”

Known professionally as Espenet, the elder Carpenter produced pieces that now are in the collections of the Smithsonian Institution and were exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art and the Museum of Contemporary Crafts in New York City. In 1984, the California Legislature passed a resolution naming him a ”living California treasure.”

Tripp Carpenter, who studied under his father and followed in his professional footsteps, said his father’s best-known piece was a ”wishbone” chair. The chair is spare and sensual and is now sold, when one can be found, for about $8,000, he said. Born in New York in 1920, Carpenter enlisted in the Navy after graduating from Dartmouth College. After World War II, he promised himself he would spent the rest of his life doing something he enjoyed.

Another of Carpenter’s well-known furniture designs was a desk that features scalloped seashell sides. In a 1983 interview for the DIY Network, Carpenter described his flowing furniture designs as ”carpenter-style, practical and utilitarian.” montereyherald.com

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