Can you rebuild a colonnade that was removed?

Yes, and it is one of the most worthwhile things you can put back in a Craftsman house. There is usually good evidence for where it stood — ghost lines on the wall and ceiling, a break in the flooring, sometimes the original bases still in place under later trim. We build the tapered columns and the book cabinets to the correct proportions and match the room's existing trim, so it reads as original rather than as a reproduction.

How closely can a new buffet match an original?

Closely, when the room still carries its original trim, because the casing profiles, the reveal and the stock widths give us the register to build in. Where an original buffet has been removed there is normally physical evidence of its footprint too. We will tell you which parts are documented by evidence and which are our judgement, rather than describing the whole thing as a restoration.

Port Huron, St Clair County, MI

Built-Ins in Port Huron, MI

Name: Maceri Woodworking
Address: 33628 Bayview Dr, Chesterfield, MI, 48047, US
Telephone: (586) 823-2887
Price range: $$

No housing stock in our service area was designed around built-in joinery the way Port Huron's Craftsman houses were. The dining room buffet, the colonnade between the living and dining rooms, the inglenook bench, the bookcases flanking the fireplace — these were part of the architecture, not furniture added later.

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.

Built-Ins questions from Port Huron homeowners

Can you rebuild a colonnade that was removed?: Yes, and it is one of the most worthwhile things you can put back in a Craftsman house. There is usually good evidence for where it stood — ghost lines on the wall and ceiling, a break in the flooring, sometimes the original bases still in place under later trim. We build the tapered columns and the book cabinets to the correct proportions and match the room's existing trim, so it reads as original rather than as a reproduction.
How closely can a new buffet match an original?: Closely, when the room still carries its original trim, because the casing profiles, the reveal and the stock widths give us the register to build in. Where an original buffet has been removed there is normally physical evidence of its footprint too. We will tell you which parts are documented by evidence and which are our judgement, rather than describing the whole thing as a restoration.