Building excellent furniture begins with excellent wood. Over the years, we’ve effort into building relationships with suppliers to make sure we can obtain wood of the highest quality that also comes from sustainable and responsible sources. To this end, we often work directly with small sawmills: Our Western Figured Maple comes from a local sawmill specializing in highly figured woods, and the Mango we use is sawn by a small mill on the Big Island of Hawaii.

The first step that takes place in our shop is layout. In this critical step, we make decisions on how to use each board to maximize grain and color without wasting any valuable wood.

From these boards, individual parts are then shaped, and sub-assemblies glued. Each part is carefully hand-fitted by our craftsmen. Since no two pieces of wood share the same grain or figure, this is a skilled and time-consuming process.
All our furniture (except the Brendan Rocker) is constructed with full Mortice and Tenon construction, the strongest wood construction methods possible. The Brendan Rocker uses a unique style of joinery drawn from boatbuilding.

We use two part nautical epoxy as an glue, a 100% solids adhesive that cures into a hard inert material. Epoxy is longer lived and many times stronger than conventional PVA yellow woodworking glues. And unlike conventional wood glue (PVA glue) epoxy bonds end-grain as well as side grain. The downside is that epoxy is not reversible; it cannot be easily disassembled. But we don't build our chairs to be disassembled. We build them to last. If repairs are necessary, we have developed techniques to rebuild our chairs by completely removing the damaged areas, including the adhesive.

Once the entire chair is assembled it is finish-sanded. Sanding is a highly skilled task. It is also the single most time consuming part of building our furniture, consuming as much as one third of the total time to build a piece. Good sanding is critical to the quality of the finished chair, as it determines the texture of the wood even after finish has been applied.

As a final step we apply several coats of Precatalyzed Lacquer to bring out the beauty and depth of the wood and protect it from water marks and abrasions. This finish is unaffected by any quantity of water below 110 F and most mild solvents. After curing each chair is inspected and rubbed out by hand.