McSwain’s

Three generations of a North Carolina family specialize in fine furniture and antique restorations.

By Hannah Miller

When a piece of furniture in a museum or a friend’s home catches the eye of many Carolinians, they’ll give McSwain’s Handmade Furniture in Charlotte, NC, a call.

“Make me one like it,” they will say, “complete with all the hand carving and historically accurate detail.”

The three generations of woodworkers at family-run McSwain’s are happy to comply. In 35 years, their customers’ inspirations have ranged from a Metropolitan Museum chest to President Truman’s poker table. Their pieces are in homes from Hawaii to New York, and their work has been featured in Southern Living and Better Homes & Gardens magazines.

Started by master carver Eulan McSwain, now 82 and still carving, the company has broadened its scope in recent years to include more modern pieces, like entertainment centers. Eulan’s son Mike, 57, joined the business 28 years ago and, like his father, is a master carver. Mike’s son Eric, 31, joined 11 years ago and is the finishing expert. Three other woodworkers work with them, as do three part-time office employees, including Mike’s wife Sylvia McSwain.

The company name has changed from its original, McSwain’s Reproductions, but 18th-century reproductions remain a specialty. “It’s all traditionally made, like in the 18th century,” Mike says.

 

	This Philadelphia-style mahogany highboy with claw and ball feet features hand carvings, such as the kidney center cartouche. This piece was built by company founder Eulan McSwain.

Only solid wood is used, including cabinet backs and drawer bottoms. Everything is hand-mortised and tenoned. “Every drawer is hand-dovetailed,” Mike says. “We don’t own a dovetailing machine.”

 

He says restoration of antiques is a significant part of their business, from 30 to 40 percent, and is a learning tool for his employees. “One of the best ways to learn to make good furniture is to work on restoring really good old furniture,” he says.

His father “is the best yet” at 18th-century reproductions, especially proportions, he adds. “He can tell you if something is right or wrong by looking at it.”

Eulan worked for other shops before going out on his own. He says that in 50 years of carving ball-and-claw Chippendale feet, he has tried to make each of those feet a little different, but not so that you can tell it by a casual glance.

“I don’t want them to look like they came out of a machine,” he says, as he works away with mallet and hand-held chisel. The McSwains buy Buck Bros. and Swiss-made Woodcrafters carving chisels and also make their own.

The McSwains don’t give out sales figures, but Mike says the shop has an eight-to-nine month backlog of work. Prices are in a wide range. The company has made chairs from $750 to $5,000 and beds from $1,500 to $11,000. Probably the most expensive piece was a Goddard block front secretary for $35,000, Mike says.

The poker table inspired by President Truman’s was a seven-sided walnut pedestal table with a set of walnut arm chairs covered in Corinthian leather. “You don’t play stud poker with an even number of people,” Mike explains. “Bad luck.”

The Metropolitan Museum chest-on-chest caught the eye of a physician customer. “They were gracious enough to give him measurements,” Mike says. Their copy is in bird’s-eye maple.

Over the years, McSwain’s has “gone the distance” to give its customers good service as well as a good product. It hired a crane to lift a $100,000 Chippendale breakfront down from a 10th-floor condominium and used a helicopter to get a restored piano into a VIP lounge at a Charlotte theme park, for instance.

In the interest of authenticity, hand-blown glass panes were individually inserted in a corner-cupboard reproduction, and the interior was coated in J.E. Moser milk paint. In a bow to the 21st century, lighting in the cupboard is remote-controlled.

Current work includes a desk and cabinet that will incorporate two 100-year-old leaded-glass doors brought in by a customer. The doors were salvaged from a cabinet in her childhood home. “That was the kind of craftsmanship they used in building homes 100 years ago,” Mike says.

When you consider the resources early craftsmen had to work with, he adds, “It’s absolutely amazing how they did it.”

In their 4,000-square-foot shop behind the showroom, the McSwains use a Delta turning lathe and Rockwell/Porter-Cable sanders, planers, shapers, saws and jointer. They use Graco HVLP sprayers to apply finishes from Constantine. They prefer clear, vegetable-based dye with a clear finish so that the grain of the wood shows through. “Environmentally, it’s very safe. It mixes with water,” Mike says.

 

				Mike McSwain designed and built this cherry corner cupboard, which features hand-blown Blinko glass in the doors and a lighted interior.

They get varnishes and lacquers pre-mixed at Carolina Solvents, and when they want an opaque look, they use Sherwin-Williams lacquers. All finishes are hand-rubbed between coats and finished with Kiwi carnauba-based wax. All hardware is solid brass from Faneuil Hardware Co. in Salem, NH.

 

The company’s lumber supply, collected over 35 years, is stored in a 4,000-square-foot warehouse near the shop and includes species like Iranian walnut, Carpathian elm, rosewood and mahogany. The shop mostly uses domestic hardwoods, though, including cherry, reclaimed heart pine, black locust, curly maple, bird’s-eye maple and walnut.

Unless he is working on a big order that requires help, a woodworker will carry a piece through from start to finish, then sign and date it. “We feel what we do is a work of art,” Mike says.

There are no individual work stations in the shop, with everyone sharing the equipment. While Eulan carved during one recent day, Craig Reeves used a Rockwell jigsaw to cut frets for a display stand for an antique “book box,” or book-shaped keepsakes container. Chris Durbin used ebony, satinwood and crotch mahogany to replace a missing filler board in an antique table, Mike showed off the Honduras mahogany bedpost he had turned on a Delta lathe for a new “California king” bed, and Ryan Navey repaired worn edges on the shelves of a chest, “half-soling” them. In another room, Eric prepared to refinish a damaged antique table.

Finding woodworkers suited to the way the McSwains work is not easy, Mike says. “I think you have to have a certain amount of talent in your hands and want to do this.”

Reeves and Durbin both have extensive experience, and 22-year-old Navey is “absolutely dedicated to woodworking,” Mike says.

Mike connected with Navey by accident, he recalls. “I would go to a lumberyard to buy crating material,” he says, and one day he saw Navey there “tackling” a pallet. “There was a really pretty piece of wood in the middle of this pallet, and he was going to get it out.

“The next time I went, I brought him some scrap lumber,” Mike adds. The acquaintance grew into a job, and now Navey spends even his lunch hours studying things like inlay detail, Mike says.

The type of individualized work they do results in a close collaboration with customers, something Mike enjoys. “In building a bed for someone to sleep in the rest of their lives, for example, we sort of develop a personal relationship with them,” he says.

Customers bring in ideas and materials and sometimes come by to take pictures of works in progress. Mike has photographs of a chest Eric made for long-standing customers, done in mahogany veneer with crotch mahogany in a Hepplewhite splayed-foot style. The couple already had bought pieces made by him and Eulan, Mike says, “and for their granddaughter, they wanted the first chest my son built.”

Helping customers decide how something will be done is the easy part of the business, he says. For projects such as entertainment centers, he asks questions like, “Where are you going to put it? If you are going to put it in the bedroom, how high is the bed you are going to watch it from?”

To complement some of the time-honored production methods used in the shop, there are high-tech touches used, too. For example, Mike scans into a computer pictures of furniture that customers bring him, so that he can blow them up and see details. Also, he sometimes uses a CAD program in the preliminary sketches he makes for customers. And McSwain’s has a Web page: www.mcswainfurniture.com.

Since pricing their type of work can be tricky, Mike gives customers a high and a low estimated price. Once the shop starts a piece, if it appears the price will exceed the range, he calls the customer. “That will happen once a year,” he says. “Being human, we make mistakes.”

The extremely custom nature of the McSwains’ business has its rewards. A longtime customer, an 85-year-old woman, brought them a door from the log cabin she was born in. She wanted a piece of furniture made from it for her daughter.

They settled on a simple-looking, four-drawer Hepplewhite huntboard, Mike says.

“I let her use her imagination,” he adds. When it was finished, “She was able to say to her daughter, ‘Look what I did.’”

The painstaking, traditional approach to woodworking is “what keeps the business alive,” Mike says, “plus our dedication to quality and the uniqueness of what we do.”

If the McSwains tried to switch to mass production, they could never compete with larger furniture companies who have it down to a science, he adds. “We’ve found a niche and we’re going to stay in it.”

Vance Publishing Corp. P.O. Box 1400 Lincolnshire, IL 60069

Phone (847) 634-4347 Fax: (847) 634-4374 E-mail: industrialinfo@vancepublishing.com