What makes Amish-built furniture different?

People ask this with a bit of skepticism, which is fair, because the phrase gets used loosely. What it means for the pieces we carry is fairly concrete: Barkman’s furniture is built by Amish craftsmen from solid wood, with joinery you can check with your own hands, and it’s built to be used every day for a very long time.

Solid wood, all the way through

A lot of furniture sold as wood is a thin veneer over something else. That isn’t always bad, but it can’t be refinished, and it doesn’t age the same way. A solid hardwood table takes the scratches and water rings of twenty years of dinners and can be sanded and refinished when you’re ready, which you can’t do to a veneer. You also feel the difference when you move it. Solid is heavy.

Joinery

Turn a Barkman chair over and look at how it’s put together. The joints are the part of a piece that fails first on cheap furniture and last on good furniture, and you can see the difference if you know to look. A designer at the showroom will happily show you, which tells you something on its own.

Sized to the room

Canal Dover works American hardwood into dining tables and casegoods sized to your room, which matters more than it sounds. A dining table six inches too long makes a room miserable to move through; six inches too short and you’ve lost a chair. Bring your room dimensions and we’ll get this right on paper before anything is built.

The rest of the room

Solid wood doesn’t have to mean heavy and rustic. Charleston Forge hand-forges metal pieces here in America, and Amisco does clean, contemporary metal; both sit comfortably next to a solid-wood table. A designer who plans the whole room (and doesn’t earn commission on any of it) will help you keep what’s worth keeping and replace the rest in an order that keeps the budget sane.

Come sit at the tables in Ann Arbor or Plymouth. The thing about solid wood is that it’s obvious in person and nearly impossible to judge from a photo.