Furniture reproduction their specialty

BY RICK THURMOND / SUN CHRONICLE STAFF

PLAINVILLE -- Life and work have come full circle for Steve and Christine Staples and Staples Cabinet Makers.

The company was launched in 1973 in Norton, when the couple mainly was involved in furniture repair and refinishing.

It expanded from there into antiques and fine furniture reproduction, then to architectural millwork. Staples specialized in doors and windows, and its work can be found in the windows of the renovated South Station in Boston, the entrance of the Bronson Building in Attleboro and 17 different entryways on the campus of Boston University.

Now Staples Cabinet Makers is focusing again on crafting fine furniture reproductions, including country tables, center islands, cupboards and coffee tables. The company has a new workshop and company store featuring antiques and custom-crafted furniture made with antique components. The new headquarters is in the old Whiting & Davis factory building at 23 West Bacon St. Coincidentally, the new space is in the old factory's car pentry shop.

Steve Staples figures the times have finally caught up with him.

`` We're doing what we've been doing for more than 25 years,'' he said. `` Our old clientele has rediscovered us. Our new clientele is eager to get what we do.

`` We can build beautiful things, cre ate these things, and not be starving artists. People finally want what we do.''

What Staples does, essentially, is recycle the past with loving care.

Stacked in the back of the work shop are antique doors, floor and wall planks from razed barns, discarded farm implements. Those items will be transformed into table tops or the focal points of cupboards and other furniture.

Staples makes some concession to automation, but much of the work is done by hand with the same sort of tools used by craftsmen two centuries ago.

Furniture is joined with dovetails and wooden pegs.

A table the company sold recently was a personal favorite of Christine Staples. She called it the ``cowlick table.''

The table top was crafted from wall planks of an old barn.

`` You could actually see the cow's tongue in the wood, where the cow had licked the wall for years and years,'' she said.

That kind of character isn't turned out at modern sawmills.

`` The character and charm of old wood is unbeatable,'' Steve Staples said. `` I've heard people say, `If only the wood could talk.' It does if you know how to listen.''

Staples' ideas come, he said, from `` looking at a pile of something -- a board or a piece of metal.''

`` I look at something, and things go together in my mind,'' he said. `` And I get a finished product out of it.''

`` I do,'' he hastened to add, `` have to put some thought into whether it will sell. But now, I'm finding, it does sell.''

Country and tavern tables Staples makes have a traditional look, al though the surfaces are rich with texture: knots, ripples and nicks carefully accentuated by the company's craftsmen.

Coffee tables tend to be more whimsical. Some of them have holes in the top or a missing corner.

`` I take great liberty with coffee tables,'' Staples said. ``Coffee tables should be fun.''

Among the company's more popular products are cupboards and cabinets.

The focal point is always the door, which might have been crafted from an old shutter, window or door fragment.

The hardware and latch might be an inverted antique hinge or a farm implement put to a new use.

`` We consider the door to be a work of art,'' Staples said. `` We frame it with the cupboard. We try to make the cupboard door jump out at you. That's really the art form.''

And while the cupboard, itself, is newly milled wood, most observers wouldn't notice.

`` We're masters of texture,'' he said.

Staples concocts his own paints and solutions, which might be applied to a piece numerous times. Included in the process is something he calls ``200 years in a can.''

`` It's a solution I developed that adds 200 years to anything you put it on,'' he said.

So adept is Staples at making new wood look old, he said he was reprimanded years ago by the curator of the Old Sturbridge Village Museum Gift Shop.

Staples was bringing in some pieces for sale, he said, and the curator thought he was trying to pull a fast one. `` Young man,'' he recalled the curator saying, ``we're not in the business of selling forgeries.''

Staples said he took the reprimand as a compliment, and ever since has stamped his furniture with a brand so it can't be passed off as antique.

`` I spent so many years doing restoration work,'' he said. `` The problem is, if you do good work, nobody sees it."

`` If somebody notices a repair, it isn't good work.''

Reproduction furniture has become more popular, Staples said, because baby boomers are looking to fill new, larger homes with quality pieces at a time when 18th and 19th century antiques are becoming more rare.

`` Lets face it, we're running out of antiques,'' he said. `` It isn't easy to go out and find an antique cupboard to fit your TV or stereo."

`` There are so many more people today, and we only had so many forefathers.''