Back when times were simpler furniture was made in small shops with one or a small few craftsmen supported by an equally limited number of journeymen or apprentices. Furniture types were limited and styles were copied from books or from observation of originals imported from Europe. Usually the fanciness and frills of the prototypes were reduced to their essential components. The result was the creation of a furniture tradition emphasizing the essentials of the prevailing style but tempered by the skill, production capacity, and simpler needs of the colonial frontier. This is collectively known as American vernacular furniture.

Each piece, a cabinet for instance, went from woodpile to the customer under the watchful eye of the master craftsman. He measured, sounded, and scrutinized for grain, color, figure and suitability every length of wood in his shop. Its transformation from timber to board was supervised by him and had to pass his signal approval to become a door or drawer or frame. The craftsman left his mark on every piece that left the shop. The way he used a plane, held the chisel at the lathe, laid out his dovetails and in myriad other details his signature was present. A particular cabinet, duplicated, would vary in such subtle ways as never to be a true copy, but always unique. Each product was custom made and the relationship between customer and craftsman personal.

The manufacture of furniture in America, and Europe, experienced a paradigm shift in the late 18th Century. The variety of types of furniture ballooned as a response to the suddenly wealthier and expanding mercantile class. Design geniuses such as, Thomas Chippendale, George Hepplewhite and Thomas Sheraton answered the demand for finer, higher quality goods and services. Their design innovations, still the index of style today, inspired the best of our vernacular furniture. But, their success sewed the seeds for the end of the tradition they had inspired to make such timeless classics. Shops became more factory-like. By the 1820s the great Duncan Phyfe employed 200 people in his New York establishment. The introduction of power sawing, planing and molding, along with standardized and simplified design placed fair-quality mass-manufactured furniture within the means of the common man. Marketed through catalogs, such as Sears, they accessorize countless thousands of homes filling the Great Plains and the burgeoning cities of the East. Today a dizzying array of furniture styles is available to the consumer. Quality ranges from particleboard decorated with a picture of wood to fairly well constructed "solid" wood pieces; described as being "made of hardwood and selected wood veneers". Basically, unspecified hard wood species and plywood is stained to match cherry or some other valuable wood to make the product. In the better grades of manufactured goods inferior cuts of wood are given an opaque stain as a camouflage. Consideration of style falls victim to the need to innovate new "looks". This produces odd combinations like Sheraton hardware adorning Chippendale-style pieces.

The Birnam Wood Joinery is dedicated to the discriminating purchaser for whom the mass-produced, the ordinary and the too desperately innovative are unacceptable. It is dedicated to crafting the finest quality American vernacular furniture in the tradition of 18th Century masters. The same quality hardwoods, the same joinery techniques and often with the same tools are used to make Birnam Wood Joinery furniture. Those characteristics that one finds on antique furniture, the tool marks, the time-tested joinery, the slight eccentricities that identify the hand made from the mechanically perfect will be found in our furniture. We make ours with the expectation that it will last two hundred years like the originals. They should be a source of pride for your generations. The purchase of fine furniture from The Birnam Wood Joinery ought to be a wise investment. We intend to make it custom and personal.