The two owners at Morningside Woodcrafters have been building and restoring pieces for over 20 years
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Brand new furniture has been coming out of Morningside Woodcrafters for over 23 years. Or furniture that’s as good as new – it depends on what service the customer wants.
The two-person team that makes up the business, Willy Brown and Shelby Reynolds, specialize in different aspects of wooden furniture. Brown restores or repairs old pieces; Reynolds custom builds new pieces.
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Brown and Reynolds have been in business together since they opened their workshop on National Avenue (Morningside Addition is the old name of the area), and they’ve been in the same location ever since.
Brown grew up around his father’s woodworking shop in Lancaster, where he started working after school and in the summers when he was 10 years old. Skilled cabinet makers and other artisans worked in the shop too, and Brown learned about furniture repair watching and learning from them. An interest blossomed, and he hasn’t done anything else since.
As Brown grew older and more accomplished, he eventually took over his father’s business, and ultimately decided to move it to Lexington, where a number of his clients were already located.
At that time, Reynolds was working for another Lexington woodworking company. An acquaintance of Brown’s, Reynolds suggested the two open a shop together when Brown was relocating to Lexington.
“I said, ‘Let’s do this together,’ because I was wanting to get out on my own as well,” Reynolds said. “But it’s kind of a scary proposition to get out there and do it by yourself.”
Reynolds (whose backyard garden is featured here) first recognized his talents for furniture making while taking woodworking classes in junior high school and high school. He attended Centre College as a theatre major, and after graduating stayed at the school for two years helping to build sets for school productions. Then he decided he was more interested in finer woodworking and enrolled in an apprentice furniture-making program in Massachusetts.
Through the years, Reynolds says that the way he builds custom furniture - from chairs and tables to grandfather clocks and beds – hasn’t changed, but new technology has changed the way he works with clients, especially when it comes to e-mailing and texting pictures.
“For a long time, I didn’t want to get a cell phone when they were new,” he said. “With texting, customers can send me pictures, and we can talk back and forth with just a text. It’s so convenient, especially for sending pictures. I can look at something and say, ‘This is going to cost this much.’”
And newer technology is also having an influence on the pieces he’s asked to construct.
“With the new flat screen TVs, a lot of people are having to convert their old cabinetry from the old, real deep TVs to the new ones,” Reynolds said, “and I have to figure out how that is going to work.”
Never a fan of mass producing, Reynolds says he finds the variety in the work the most rewarding aspect of the job. Still, for nearly the past 15 years, every year Reynolds is contracted to build the wooden base for each trophy presented at the annual Eclipse Awards, which honors people and horses in the Thoroughbred industry.
Brown jokes that if he and Reynolds stay in business much longer together, he will probably start seeing some of Reynolds’ custom furniture come through the door in need of restoration.
While he does fix newer furniture, Brown says that the majority of the pieces he works on is furniture dating from 1780 to 1880. Most clients bringing pieces in for repair or restoration are familiar with the items’ ages, and maybe even value, but sometimes a person will bring in an object and want Brown to investigate its age and origin. He looks at the style, the type of wood and the hardware used to construct the piece to inform his answer.
From time to time, he’s also had to break a customer’s heart when he finds that the piece they have brought in is actually a reproduction, and not as old as they had initially thought.
“I can tell if it’s a reproduction because I know a lot of the tricks, too, to make these things look old,” Brown said, “so I know some of the tricks someone else may have used.”
Brown says his favorite furniture to work on, and he’s worked on pieces from all over the world, using the same tools craftspeople used up to 90 years ago, are Kentucky items from the early 19th century. He likes seeing the building science cabinet makers employed over 200 years ago.
“Most people just see the outside of the furniture, and I’ve taken apart so many and put them together,” he said. “So I’ve seen the backs and the insides and the bottoms – the whole construction method of how they’ve been made. It’s very interesting to see what other cabinet makers did, and even the little mistakes they’ve made sometimes.”
And when it comes to covering up their mistakes, Brown says that is something modern furniture makers have in common with their predecessors.
“That’s what cabinet makers do now and that’s what they did 200 years ago,” he said. “Everything wasn’t perfect like people think.”