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2008/12/17
Tuesday, December 16, 2008
By KIM BARTO - Bulletin Staff Writer
At a time when more and more furniture makers are taking production overseas, a Martinsville business is going against the grain.
In a workshop near the train tracks on Railroad Street is Wooden Creations Inc., where craftsmen create custom, hand-carved furniture pieces for clients all over the world.
Eric Gilbert, president, started the company in 1990 and has made furniture for manufacturers, interior designers, hotels, colleges and more.
“Customers know that they can just bring us a picture, and we can make it,” he said.
The workshop is putting these skills to use as needed for renovations at the former Hairston plantation at Beaver Creek, which now houses Bank Services of Virginia.
Bank representative Bill Moore was “excited that we were local,” Gilbert said, and “came over with some balusters they wanted us to duplicate.”
Gilbert’s workshop turned almost 40 maple balusters, which are vertical railing supports for the building’s back galleries.
Moore said he learned of Wooden Creations through word-of-mouth and praised the craftsmen’s “real expertise” in copying the original balusters and hand-turning them.
“It was amazing to me what they did, and they were very accommodating,” Moore said.
Restoration work will take another month or two, he said.
Wooden Creations has started doing more high-end custom furniture in recent years, but those commissions did not always make up the bulk of their business, Gilbert said.
Making samples for big furniture companies “used to be a much bigger part,” he said. “For years and years, we’d help produce prototypes for shows,” namely the High Point Furniture Market.
The market “was the best,” not only because it meant more business, but because “it had an aspect of challenge involved,” Gilbert said.
“The customer would come in and say, ‘I need this dresser in a week.’ ... You can’t push the deadline back any further. I enjoyed that a lot,” he said.
Nowadays, he said, “We’ve lost a lot of the sample business. Custom business has picked it up some, but we are smaller than we were.”
The workshop has gone from 15 employees at its peak to six, Gilbert said.
“The biggest impact is the loss of the factories,” he said. “It used to be one large company giving an order for 15 tables; now, it’ll be 10 different orders from designers.”
There is more out-of-state than local demand for the high-end pieces, Gilbert said. He recently delivered three tables to Long Island, where much of his current business comes from, along with Manhattan and Philadelphia. But even members of the upper crust are spending less now, he said.
The process of making furniture to order depends on the customer.
“If it’s a company, they’ll send us a blueprint, and we’ll work from their specs. If it’s a designer, it’s just a sketch or a photo or a description” of the desired piece, Gilbert said.
When he gets an order from a designer, Gilbert spends the next eight to 10 hours making a blueprint using the Auto-CAD engineering and drafting program.
“I’ll do a full-scale drawing, then print it off on giant paper. From that paper, we get finishes made and get approval from the customer,” he said.
Custom pieces usually take about a month to produce from start to finish, Gilbert said.
The wood comes primarily from North Carolina, with some from Danville, he said. They mainly use maple, cherry and walnut.
Woodworking is the “type of thing I always liked as a kid,” Gilbert said.
He got his start working with a small woodshop while taking college classes at night. Though classes in subjects such as business management helped, it was on-the-job training that Gilbert said taught him more than anything else.
Gilbert said he likes making custom furniture because “it’s always new. Sometimes you have intricate challenges. We’re always trying to work something out.” |
