And the lathe, he added, “took me from a dude in a shop making whatever came along to a designer who was producing original work that people sought out to purchase.” This machine is where he turns his popular tables and lamps, whose voluptuous bases suggest the bust mannequins at Lane Bryant.

An earlier generation of woodworkers was almost religious about hand tools. In the movement called Studio Craft, an artisan expressed an individual credo through consummate skill and strenuous human effort. You could see it in the hand-planing, the subtle gouges and rips.

Building a chest of drawers this way could take four to six weeks, said Peter Korn, an author and the executive director of the Center for Furniture Craftsmanship, a woodworking school in Rockport, Me.

“When I was a self-employed furniture maker, I made every mortise and tenon by hand,” Mr. Korn said. “Because I enjoyed it, and it was about integrity. And I starved.”

Students can still study that art at the center. Sometimes it’s the best method for the job. But they also practice joinery with a machine called a Festool Domino. A few years ago, Mr. McGlasson bought his own, despite the $900 price tag. “I wanted to hate it,” he said.

Mr. McGlasson runs across plenty of Studio Craft furniture at American Craft Council shows, where he sometimes rents a booth. He can appreciate the technical proficiency that goes into melding six types of wood into a single table. He calls it “extreme woodworking” or “woodworking for woodworkers.”

But woodworkers are not his clientele. To reach his niche, he is paying $5,800 for perhaps 100 square feet of floor space at the Architectural Digest expo. Kiki Dennis, who runs Kiki Dennis Interiors, in Brooklyn, sourced a Woodsport credenza for a Park Slope client who attended last year’s show.