 If
you're thinking of having us make
something for your home, you may
be interested to know more about
what makes our work unique. A bit
of the difference is in the woodworking.
A bit of the difference is in
the design.
More than anything, what makes
our work truly different is the
wood itself.
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 You can't have the lumberyard's truck pull up to your cabinet shop and expect to get wood of any real interest. This is modern economics: Hundreds of logs come into the sawmill and are treated basically the same. The sawmill's goal is to produce boards of a more or less uniform look, meaning a clear, straight
grain, with no significant character. It's the most practical way to sell boards, but it ignores some of the most important techniques of the old cabinetmakers.
 Book-matching
To describe just one of these techniques, book matching, a log is sawn in one direction – think of parallel slices – so that the resulting boards can be kept in a sequence. They are then, when opened like the pages of a book, mirror images of each other. All the beauty and interest of the grain in one board is identical to that of the board next to it, allowing the cabinetmaker to take every advantage of the character of the wood and create a unique piece of furniture.
 Hand
Sawn Logs
The thing is, you'd have a hard time getting a modern sawmill to saw a log that way for you, especially if, like us, you need only twenty-five logs a year. So, some years ago we discovered Pete Clark, a farmer in upstate New York who happens to own a sawmill which was state-of-the-art around 1920. During the winter, when there isn't much farming to do, Pete doesn't mind taking the time to saw each log just the way we want it. (Each log, by the way, is found by Pete's brother Dave, who spends considerable time in the Clark family's woods in the northern Catskills, and can offer us the pick of their forest.)
These wonderful, interesting boards are given a year or more to air-dry, slowly, in an old barn not far from where they're sawn. Then, when they're properly seasoned, they're ready to work into something worthy of them. |
 Just as the wood directs the design of the furniture it becomes, so it directs its finish. Every tree has its own unique chemistry. An oak growing twenty yards from another oak may grow in soil with a different mineral composition, and so will have a different response to the same finish. As a result, to achieve a uniform look on boards from different trees, modern finishing techniques actually aim to obscure the wood. Heavy stains are needed to "correct" color differences. The grain is masked. The natural colors are lost.
 The
Tree's Story
This approach is unnecessary if all the wood comes from the same tree. Not practical for the modern cabinetmaker, but it's the only way we work. And this brings a profound result. With no need to "correct" for color differences from mismatched boards, our finishes have two simple tasks: to bring out all the beauty in the wood, and to protect it for generations. (Incidentally, no attempt is ever made to distress our furniture. No fake wormholes. No ersatz flyspecks. No artificial scratches.) Our finishes are tough – modern, hand-applied varnishes, which allow our furniture to be part of everyday life. The only maintenance required is an occasional wipe with a damp cloth, and if you desire, a bit of paste wax or polish now and then to bring up the shine.
 Our
shop is small, almost modest. The
most advanced piece of equipment
in it is the stereo. We only produce
some 50 pieces a year, and we're
pretty sure that's about as many
as we want to make. (Any more,
of course, would mean we'd have
to look for a second sawmill. Pete
can only stay away from his farming
for so long.)
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