How I Started a Live Edge Furniture Company on Long Island

The author proudly displays a black cherry slab sourced from a fallen tree. Background: Ghent Wood Products in Columbia County, NY, where the cherry slabs were kiln-dried.

As far back as I can remember, I've always been fascinated by live edge furniture. When I was a kid, growing up in Queens, NY, I used to spend Saturdays at my grandparents' house where they had a beautiful live edge table made from California redwood. The folds and wavy texture of the wood were mesmerizing to me. This fascination stayed with me throughout my life, and in 2008, when I moved into my first apartment in a busy downtown business district in Valley Stream, NY, I needed furniture. It was then that I decided to refinish my grandparents' old live edge table.

I quickly set out to refinish the piece, running an extension cord out the window into the municipal parking lot near the train station. Although it was a cool old apartment with a huge sunlit living room, I didn't yet have any dust collection systems, so I made it work by sanding outside. As I worked on the table, I learned a lot about how to apply a tung oil finish, other finishes, and more. I was content with the finished product, but I wanted more. I dreamed of finding logs on the side of the road and milling them to make my own lumber.

I had no idea how to do any of this, but I researched everything I could online. I learned about Alaska chainsaw mills and wanted to purchase one. Fast forward to 2012, and I was living in Glen Cove, on the North Shore of Long Island. Superstorm Sandy devastated the Island and left trees, some hundreds of years old, strewn about the roads. Many of these trees ended up being thrown in the wood chipper or turned into firewood. Some were rescued to make lumber, but the sheer volume of material left around all at the same time made recovery difficult. I felt disturbed by this.

Years went by, and the ideas stayed in my mind. In 2015, I was living in Seattle, and I couldn't help but notice that live edge was everywhere. Coffee shops, bars, hip boutiques, you name it. This was around the time that Amazon was growing by leaps and bounds, and over 1000 people were moving to the Emerald City per week, many working in the booming tech sector. There was an explosion of creativity, investment, and wealth creation happening. With this came a tremendous amount of creative, quirky, artists and makers. Everyone I talked to seemed to be doing something cool. Either brewing beer at home, making homemade pasta and curing salami (as in the case of my cousin), and working at the next startup that was going to change the world. It was dizzying and inspiring to say the least. It taught me that if I wanted to do something, I just had to go out and get it done. Just do it, as it were.

Seattle, now a global tech hub, was once a frontier logging town, and the Pacific Northwest is still an epicenter of this industry. Lumber, woodworking, roots run deep, and there's no shortage of excellent woodworkers. I enrolled in woodworking classes at Pratt Fine Arts Center in Seattle, where I learned about traditional joinery and hand tools. I also enrolled in welding classes, with the goal of making steel table legs myself.

Now the question remained: how could I source the wood? Turns out I needed a desk for my home office and wanted a slab table. Slabs in and around Seattle were expensive—too expensive for me to contemplate at the time with a new baby and a five-year-old. So I searched sites about 1.5 hours from Seattle and found one in Snohomish county, near an old logging area. I saw some incredible Bigleaf maple slabs there and asked my five-year-old daughter to pick one out. She did, and it was amazing! She always had a good eye for this.

It was about 11 feet long, but no worries—we carefully tied it to the roof of our Volkswagen Jetta station wagon and drove back to Seattle with it. Somehow, I managed to carry it up the stairs to our third-floor walk-up in the Upper Queen Anne neighborhood. Glad none of my neighbors saw me because I may have seemed like a crazy person. Why didn't I cut it at the sawmill, you might ask? Well, I needed time to figure out what to do with it. I knew it was more than I needed, but I also figured I'd make something cool out of the off-cut.

Just like back on Long Island, I couldn't exactly do woodworking projects in the apartment. I managed to cut the slab down to size with a Japanese saw and placed it on some saw horses near the parking lot of the apartment building, which was also in a busy business district, but it afforded me plenty of space to work. Working outside was pleasant, ideal even, especially in late June in Seattle. It was usually clear, nearly windless, and our northern latitude afforded me plenty of sunlight. I typically was able to sand and sculpt the piece with simple hand tools until about 9 pm. This went on for a week or so until I was finally ready to finish my desktop. I knew I didn't want a polyurethane or any finish that simply sits on top of the wood, and my previous experience with tung oil made me research more. I learned about Rubio Monocoat from a local paint shop and picked up a tin. I managed to finish the table right there outside of my apartment. I couldn't help but notice some of the passersby admiring my handiwork.

After finishing the top, I fashioned the off-cut into a beautiful coffee table. No sooner than I had completed this project did I realize that my time in Seattle was coming to an end. I got a job offer at my old company back in NYC, and with the new baby, I simply couldn't resist the pull of going back home and being closer to friends and family.

The Bigleaf Maple table in Upper Queen Anne, Seattle, WA.

Before I left Seattle, I decided to sell the off-cut and transformed it into a small coffee table with black metal legs. It sold immediately on Facebook Marketplace for a good price. I liked the feeling of this! The job back home was good, but I still felt the pull of doing something creative. I knew I was an artist at heart and wanted to build something that was entirely my own. There was a kind of stubbornness there, a yearning to do my own thing, regardless of what anyone said. A defiant creative energy that couldn't be ignored.

I knew one thing, though—the North Shore had tons of trees that fell down at every storm. And since Glen Cove was part of the "Gold Coast" of Long Island, there are still vast swaths of forest on the former estates. Due to the soil, the trees were big, and I knew that if I waited for a storm, something would materialize.

In March 2018, that storm came in the form of a powerful nor'easter. As I laid in bed, the power out, I could hear the wind whipping against the house and the sound of my neighbors' recycling bins blowing down the street. The first thing I did in the morning was to get on Facebook Messenger and send messages to local parks and non-profits that managed some of the old estates here on the North Shore. One responded right away and told me that they had some logs from trees that fell down.

I drove out to meet with the property manager and invited my old friend to join me. I had told him about my idea to start a live edge company, and he was all in. We drove carts through the woods along the trails to survey the damage from the storm. A large honey locust tree, an American beech, and a large red oak tree were strewn along the side of the trail, all ripe for the taking. The only catch was that we had to hire the tree service to recover the logs and get them to my friend's property, where we could store them temporarily before being milled. I had never seen honey locust wood before, but I could tell by the rings on the log and the bright colors on the bark, including some streaks of blue and green, that this tree was something special. "We'll take it!"

Next, we walked to a big stack of logs in a clearing in the forest where I was shown a log from a katsura tree. I had never heard of that before either. As it happens, the original owner of the property was an avid collector of tree specimens, many of them rare, and his estate was now an arboretum. We had stumbled upon something very special indeed.

When I researched the Katsura tree, I learned that it is native to Japan but is now a popular ornamental tree that can easily be identified by its unique, heart-shaped leaves. Nearly impossible to find lumber in the United States. We were fortunate to score a few logs and produce about 6-7 slabs. Beginner's luck, it would seem.

Next, we had to find a sawyer based on Long Island. I didn't know one, but I was determined to find one. I did some initial research online and spent some time calling sawmills and sawyers during my long commute home from the Bronx or the Hudson Valley during my medical sales job (don't worry, I had a great hands-free device in my car). Beats sitting in traffic and listening to the radio.

I posted on Facebook in a local homesteading group about my project, and they recommended a local guy named Steve who mostly does timber framing but also likes to take on milling projects for select clients. Let's call him Steve the Sawyer. Steve is a mellow, long-haired Long Island native with a chill dog that seems to be perfectly content relaxing in the bed of his truck or under the awning that houses his workshop near the sawmill. Thoroughly unique. I knew we had found our guy.

Steve brought his Woodmizer sawmill, and we spent the day milling the logs into beautiful slabs. The honey locust slabs were stunning, with their swirling grain patterns and vibrant colors, as were the katsura slabs.

At this point, I was already marketing myself locally under the banner of Sound Designs. The name Sound Designs was a way to connect my experience of being inspired by my time in Seattle, near Puget Sound, and the waters near Glen Cove, which is called the Long Island Sound.

Still doing the day job, which paid the bills, but testing out new designs for coffee tables and other small pieces with the limited stock of wood I was able to acquire on the side. On the days when I worked from home, I was able to run outside and work in the driveway, garage, or basement immediately after completing work and obsessively practice making bow tie inlays.

Fast forward to late 2019, and we got our first big job—a restaurant in Brooklyn called Whole Bowl. We did tables, benches, shelves, and more. It was a big project for us at the time,  but we were up for the challenge. The owners were thrilled with the results, and it was a great feeling to see our work in a public space, being enjoyed by so many people. Shortly thereafter, requests for giant dining tables and other restaurant jobs came rolling in.

Whole Bowl, Brooklyn. Shortly before it opened in the fall of 2019.

Then came the COVID-19 pandemic, and how we responded to this event is perhaps a story for another time. But suffice it to say, we are still here, still creating, and still inspired by the beauty of live edge furniture.

Important notes:

Although we started as a live edge company, we have continued to grow and change over the years. Our work no includes cabinetry and other furniture styles.

·  We do not have affiliate relationships with any of the products mentioned in the post.

#liveedgefurniture #reclaimedwood #longisland #glencoveny