The day I spoke with Reynold Rodriguez, Hurricane Fiona had just descended on Puerto Rico, leaving in its wake dangerous floods and extensive blackouts. “Emotionally, it’s a lot, to have to go back to something very similar to Maria,” says Rodriguez, a furniture designer based in San Juan, recalling the catastrophic storm of 2017. Yet in his creative work, Rodriguez has found adversity to be formative, even invigorating. It was Hurricane Maria that emboldened him to begin designing highly expressive pieces of furniture—the kind he’d dreamed of making for a long time—and to allow his practice as a millwork contractor to recede into the background. “I have a passion for wood, but my true passion is to communicate ideas through design,” he says. “After Maria, I had this restlessness, this desire to show what I could do. One day I woke up and said The time is now.”

Salvaging many of the trees felled by the category 5 hurricane—massive hunks of mahogany, almendro, and guanacaste wood—Rodriguez carved a series of chairs with unexpected curves and shapes. Among these are Gravity and Grace, a mismatched pair that look almost like boulders, the unevenness of their bulky exteriors balanced by perfectly smooth seats. Both are made from mahogany charred to a deep black. Rodriguez posted images of the entire process on Instagram, from collecting trees on the street to hand-carving the trunks, and soon found a following.