At Los Angeles Modern Auctions' December sale, vintage plywood pieces by Charles and Ray Eames were practically raffled off while the serious money zeroed in on the furniture made by the late Japanese-American designer George Nakashima. The star was a cabinet nearly 13 feet long handcrafted by Nakashima from black walnut and cedar. The winning bidder—New York antiques dealer Anthony DeLorenzo—paid $123,375, more than double the $60,000 estimate, almost breaking the auction record for Nakashima that he had set the previous summer when he spent $129,250 for a table by the designer.

This sudden surge in price isn't a sign of a speculative, art-world-style bubble but is rather a long-overdue acknowledgment of Nakashima's singular aesthetic. Although he was a contemporary of the Eameses and the Scandinavians who make up the mid-century canon, Nakashima has only gradually earned the appreciation of collectors, who wrote him off as too Japanese or even belonging to the Arts and Crafts movement. His creations, always hand carved and often untreated and left raw at the edges, have little in common with the clean geometry of most mid-century designs. Today Diane von Furstenberg and Steven Spielberg are among his high-profile aficionados.

"He made as many pieces in his lifetime as the Eameses did in a month," says Robert Aibel, owner and director of the Moderne Gallery in Philadelphia, which has promoted Nakashima's work since his death in 1990. "Each chair is different. The form is the same, but the woods or even a particular board is different. If you compare the price to an Eames, [the cabinet auctioned in Los Angeles] was downright cheap." Aibel estimates that Nakashima pieces have appreciated between 200% and 500% over the past decade.

Collectors can wax rhapsodic about how a Nakashima coffee table hewn from a single slab can balance the chill of too many modern pieces stuffed in one room. "It has a more soulful quality," says collector and graphic designer Tom Voss. "It seems to me to be more authentic somehow than all the mass-produced Eames stuff."

Nakashima was well on his way to being a chilly Modernist himself until a religious awakening in India, combined with his internment in a camp for Japanese Americans in Idaho during World War II, led to his discovery of traditional Japanese woodworking. While in the camp, he trained with a traditional carpenter, then after the war moved to New Hope, Pa., to establish his studio. Today his daughter Mira Nakashima continues to run the studio with several of her father's senior artisans, working in his tradition and producing her own line as well. "People who live in extremely contemporary glass-and-steel homes have an affinity for his furniture," says Mira. "My dad said, 'People who live in glass houses have lost contact with nature. And this is a way to bring it back to them.'" •