Custom Furniture in Tyler, TX

Tables, benches, beds and shelving built to the room — including for the Azalea and Brick Streets houses, where nothing standard was ever going to fit.

Houses built before furniture came in standard sizes

The Brick Streets district goes back to the mid-1800s and the Azalea district covers 1900 to 1953. Neither was laid out around anything a factory makes today. Ceilings are higher, so a standard bookcase stops embarrassingly short of the picture rail. Dining rooms in the older houses are long and narrow rather than square. Bay windows want a seat that no catalog produces. Chimney breasts leave two alcoves that are never the same width as one another.

Building to the room is not an indulgence in those houses. It is the difference between furniture that looks placed and furniture that looks like it was always there.

Proportion first, ornament second

People in these districts often open with a request for a reproduction, and what the room usually needs is the right proportion in a plain, well-made piece. A table at the correct height and length in a good timber sits comfortably in a Queen Anne room; the same table covered in applied ornament tends to announce itself as new no matter how carefully the ornament is done.

So the conversation is mostly about scale, timber and finish. If a period detail genuinely will not read as new, we will do it. If it will, we will tell you before you pay for it.

What gets built

Dining and farmhouse tables at whatever length the room takes. Window seats. Benches, including the stepped kind for a hall or porch. Bed frames sized to rooms and doorways that will not take a modern frame. Console and sofa tables built to the wall. Bookcases and shelving run to the real ceiling height. Coffee tables. Blanket chests. Children's step stools. Plant stands. Kitchen islands.

There is a crew here, not one pair of hands

Grace Woodwork is several people. A set of six chairs does not take six times as long as one, a room's worth of furniture does not sit waiting on one person to work through it in order, and a larger commission is a job we can take rather than one we have to turn down.

How a build starts

With a measurement and an idea, and a photograph of the room — which matters more in an old house than anywhere, because the room is doing half the deciding. From there we talk timber, finish, price and timing. Nothing is cut until you have a real number. Tyler is about forty minutes from the shop and we deliver and install rather than leaving it in the driveway.

Questions we get from Tyler