Built-Ins in Port Huron, MI

A great many of them were torn out in the second half of the last century, and rebuilding them is the most valuable work we do in this city. The colonnade is the signature piece: a pair of tapered square columns sitting on half-height book cabinets, dividing the living and dining rooms without closing them off. It is a distinctive Craftsman element, it is almost never available to buy, and a house that has lost one reads as an ordinary open-plan room until it is back. The built-in buffet is the other: a run of drawers and cupboards with a counter and a glazed or mirrored upper section, built into the dining room wall. We reconstruct both from the same evidence we use elsewhere — ghost lines, surviving flooring patterns where a unit was removed, matching examples in comparable houses, and whatever original trim profiles the room still carries. In the nineteenth-century houses across the city we build the other range: library shelving, window seats with radiator housings, and alcove cabinetry beside chimney breasts, all matched to the room's own millwork.

Reconstruction work starts with a survey for evidence, and we are explicit about what is documented and what is a judgement call. Everything is built and finished at our Chesterfield shop; you are welcome to see it on the bench.

Port Huron is about thirty miles from our Chesterfield shop, at the north end of the river run we work every week.