John Charles Thompson Jr. was 10 when he accompanied his parents to George Nakashima's studio in the late 1950s.

After removing their shoes, the family walked around an enormous barn in New Hope, Pa., sizing up the visionary furniture designer's vast collection of flitches, which are large pieces of wood.

The Thompsons asked their eldest son what appealed to him. The Boy Scout homed in on a slab of burled Persian walnut. He touched the wood with his bare foot.

"I liked everything about it. I knew what burls were. The grain of a burl is so twisted that you can carve out of it a wooden cup that will last you a lifetime," recalled Mr. Thompson, now a lawyer living in Wilkinsburg.

The coffee table, made in 1958, will be auctioned next Saturday along with a Nakashima long-arm lounge chair that Mr. Thompson also consigned to Concept Art Gallery at 1031 S. Braddock Ave. in Regent Square, where the sale begins at 10 a.m.

The coffee table could command prices as high as $30,000 to $40,000 while the chair could sell for $24,000 to $30,000, according to the gallery's Web site.

Sam Berkovitz, owner of Concept Gallery, said the Nakashima lounge chair is fairly rare because the Japanese-American designer made fewer than 10 of them.

Both pieces, he added, possess the organic, sculptural qualities that distinguish Nakashima's work.

"He really sweeps nature right into the living environment," Mr. Berkovitz said.

Nakashima collectors are legion; among them are filmmaker George Lucas. The auction will attract devotees of modernist design, too, because it includes furniture by Marcel Breuer, Alvar Alto, George Nelson, Eames chairs and also a rope-edge Eames rocker.

Even in a gallery full of modernist furniture, Nakashima's work is singular. Four years ago, Mr. Thompson's mother moved from Somerset County to the Hawaiian island of Maui, leaving behind three pieces of Nakashima furniture at her eldest son's home.

"Taking them to Hawaii is not an option because they have wood-boring insects there," the lawyer said.

For the past four years, the coffee table and the lounge chair have sat in Mr. Thompson's living room. He leans over the large slab of black walnut that forms the single arm rest on the long-arm lounge chair.

"It's so solid and so comfortable," he said. Smiling slightly, he points out a flaw in the arm rest, saying it dates to a spirited game of shoot-the-moon, which is played with a metallic roller ball, a piece of wood and two rods.

Mr. Thompson has three brothers who live in Hawaii. Their mother, Gene Wallace Thompson Kennedy, decided that with four sons and three pieces of Nakashima furniture, the best solution was to sell the two best examples. (Mr. Thompson is keeping a cherry Nakashima bench.)

"We're not allowed to bid," Mr. Thompson said, referring to his brothers. "We all agree that my mother's really smart."

Mr. Thompson learned about Nakashima furniture during an idyllic boyhood in Lumberville, a Bucks County town on the Delaware River in eastern Pennsylvania. He attended a small prep school there and the homes of many of the 13 students in his eighth grade class had Nakashima furniture.

The Thompsons lived in a home built in the 1720s with 3-foot thick stone walls.

"We lived in a place that was built before the Revolution. It had a hi-de-ho above the kitchen where you could hide from the Indians," Mr. Thompson recalled, adding that he and his three brothers had the third floor to themselves.

In the winter, Mr. Thompson skated on a canal parallel to the Delaware River, going eight miles to New Hope. In the summer, he fished or kayaked, even building his own craft by stretching canvas over a kayak frame.

All that came to an end in the early 1960s when his father, a fiction writer and advertising executive named John Charles Thompson, died in an automobile accident. The family moved to Pittsburgh soon afterward and Mr. Thompson, after a year at Allderdice High School, transferred to Peabody.

"My mother's father was the head of the chemistry department at Chatham College. We were lucky enough to have a place to come back to," Mr. Thompson recalled.