Robert "Rob" Kitchens

Robert 'Rob' Kitchens was born on 1 August 1957 in Newport Beach, California, the second of five siblings in a close-knit family that summered on the water and gathered around music. He was a true artist almost from the start: a left-handed boy who drew with uncanny accuracy, played trumpet, then flute, then guitar, and could hear a song once and reassemble it from memory. A high school ceramics class lit a spark that never went out, and by the time he left home he had already bought rental property in Costa Mesa and installed his own kiln there.

After studying at Humboldt State, where he marched with the school's Lumberjack band, Rob encountered the Unification movement in San Francisco in 1980 on his way home from college. It was an outlier turn that shook the family, but it set the course of his life. He joined a small team at Ned's Loft, a wood-inlay studio later known as the Gallery, and helped pioneer its marquetry production process. On 14 October 1982, in Seoul, Korea, he received the Blessing with Hiromi Ogata.

In 1983 Rob and Hiromi followed the company east to Farmingdale, New York, where it rebranded as Creative Designs, and in 1987 to Ossining. There he led the digitisation of the studio and brought laser cutting into the shop, eventually continuing the craft under the name Hudson River Inlay. The headstones he designed for friends and family still stand in the cemetery he visited often.

After years of trying, Rob and Hiromi welcomed their son Jeremy in December 1995. Rob was a kind-hearted, patient father who never pressed his own talents on his son and trusted Jeremy to find his own way. The family vacationed across California, upstate New York, Tokyo, and Miyazaki, and ran a Sunshine Green garden class out of the lower floor of the Ossining house. When friends lost their apartment to a fire in 1999, Rob simply said, 'Come on over'; he later shared that lower floor again for two years with a friend out of work.

Rob played guitar at Sunday service at the Belvedere Family Church, sang in the choir, and anchored the G5 jam band that turned countless living rooms into concerts. He strung his guitar upside down, played left-handed flute, rapped like 'a poet on steroids,' and championed Joe Pass, Joni Mitchell, and the Grateful Dead. He quietly funded fifty cookstoves for fifty families in Uganda over a decade of giving.

In December 2023 a seizure revealed a terminal illness. Rob met it the way he had met the bow of a boat heading for a piling as a teenager: without hesitation, glass half full. To the end he told friends, 'I am so grateful, I feel so blessed.' He is survived by his son Jeremy and his siblings David, Susan, James, and Thomas, and by a community that will carry his music forward.