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Furniture made in the United States is a dying breed. Gat Caperton, owner of Gat Creek in Berkeley Springs, WV, says 10 percent of the wood furniture sold in this country was being imported from Asia when he bought the company 10 years ago. Now, that figure stands at 70 percent.
Such statistics make Caperton and several furniture makers in the Washington region stand out that much more. To be sure, their furniture is more expensive than mass-produced imports, but consider what you get for the money: custom work, assembled by hand, with a keen eye toward the highest quality possible. Customers “are tired of buying disposable stuff,” says Samuel S. Case. “They want something they perceive is going to last forever.”
Here’s a look at a handful of local artisans building with a view toward “forever.”
Niermann Weeks
Eleanor McKay and Joe Niermann, founders and owners of Niermann Weeks, are celebrating their 30th year in a business whose origins began in Memphis, TN, where she was a museum curator and he did restoration work for museums in several cities. The museums started asking Niermann to build duplicates, and that work evolved into his own designs. “It was apparent that there was a market for things that looked like antiques but were better made – where the maid could whack a leg and you wouldn’t faint,” McKay says.
Niermann Weeks’ wild success selling to the trade lies, perhaps, in its ability to incorporate antique methods of construction while using modern scale and materials. McKay and Niermann are most proud of their 400 eco-friendly finishes, which are applied by hand in multiple layers. “When you look at one of our pieces, I want you to think you’re looking into a piece of marble, where you can see all the layers,” McKay says.
Samuel S. Case Cabinetmakers
Samuel S. Case comes from several generations of antique dealers, but he was trained as a graphic designer and worked as a magazine photographer for several years before becoming a cabinetmaker. In between freelance magazine assignments, he worked at his father-in-law’s carpentry shop in the 1980s. He had drifted into real estate development, but left in 1989 when that market crashed. Suddenly, his hobby became his full-time job. Ten years ago, he expanded his business from his garage and barn in Bluemont, VA, to a converted apple-packing plant in Berryville.
Now, he designs all the pieces for his eponymous company, and has recently hired an interior design staff to coordinate Case pieces with other decor in a client’s home. His Internet sales business has flourished, and he intends to go into upholstered furniture in the future. He is currently working on a large commission for the White House.
Case designs furniture that is historically accurate, such as Shaker and Mission. He scoffs at other furniture makers who merely label their furniture with a certain style, with little regard to its historic origins. He points to a delicate Shaker table in his factory with a lovely rounded leg. “We turn round parts on a lathe by eye and by hand,” he says – no computerized machines involved.
“I trained myself in antique furniture through reading and handling and looking at antique furniture,” he adds, noting that he has a reference library of more than a thousand books on antiques. “You have to know all of it, or you don’t know what you’re doing. You can’t design a Chevrolet if you don’t know what Fords look like.”
Gat Creek
Gat Caperton got a B in high school shop class, “but I was really a C student,” he says. The reason he got a higher grade is because his shop teacher took home the cocktail table Caperton didn’t finish, and fixed it up for his own home. Fast forward a few years, and this West Virginia native is back in his home state, with an MBA from the University of Chicago, running a furniture company (but not making anything himself). The factory in Berkeley Springs, WV, turns out 30,000 pieces of handmade furniture each year in styles ranging from antique reproduction to contemporary – both for custom trade orders and retailers around the country. Caperton recently agreed to a licensing deal with Mount Vernon, noting that George Washington rode along the route where his factory now stands.
Despite the scale of the operation, each piece is produced one at a time, by one person who signs and dates the finished work. And while many furniture orders can take up to 12 weeks, Gat Creek turns its orders around in 28 days.
“We build really nice, solid wood,” Caperton says. “Most people can’t do this level of production.”
Hardwood Artisans
The six owners of Hardwood Artisans pride themselves on their length of service at the 32-year-old company in Woodbridge, VA. The company started life as the Loft Bed Store and has since branched out to almost every kind of wood furniture, including custom designs for clients who will draw a sketch of what they want.
“Every one of us started out in the trenches as a craftsman and started out making beds at $6.50 per hour,” says Mark Gatterdam, an owner who has been with the company since 1987. The youngest of the owners has “only” been there for 12 years.
As Gatterdam leads a visitor through the cavernous shop, filled with all manner of cutting, gluing, and sanding machines, he describes the intricate process of building a piece of furniture, with some pieces taking hundreds of steps to complete. A large banner that reads “Amaze & Delight” hangs over the point at which the finished product is shipped out. “We’re selling an experience for the customer,” Gatterdam says.
Spectrum collection
The natural question for anyone talking to Marc Ross, the young creative director of Spectrum Collection, which produces furniture made exclusively from acrylic, is, how on earth did you get into this field? The answer lies in the work of his grandfather, who worked in rubber and plastics factories in Germany and New York. Eric Ross eventually used that expertise to start his own company, making poly-vinyl products for household goods. “My father [Pete Ross, Spectrum’s CEO] worked in his business and learned about plastics that way,” Marc says. Pete Ross trained as an engineer at Georgia Tech, and he ultimately applied his plastics background to making furniture.
High-end designers all over the country now order Spectrum products, which feature classical lines in this unexpected material. Currently on order is a neoclassic-styled cocktail table for Kathy Hilton, Paris’ mother.
Marc Ross is taking the company’s designs in a mid-century-inspired direction with a new collection called Spectrum West, which features bright colors and contemporary lines. The factory in Jessup, MD, handles the custom orders for all of Spectrum’s collections, while a workshop in Thailand produces a small inventory for them.
“We’re molding acrylic to extremes that no other person in the country can do,” Marc says – hence the high price. But it’s understandable once he describes the process of heating and slowly bending sheets of acrylic in a giant vise to become a finished piece of furniture. “It’s the difficulty of being able to mold acrylic – there’s a lot of labor involved.”
