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About My Work
 Vintage wood provides me with a variety of textures from the original milling process, such as saw marks and hand planing marks, as well as exterior applications and weathering effects. Most of the wood I use is construction grade lumber, originally intended as framing materials, attic floors, siding and exterior fascia board. This wood is typically pine, heart pine, spruce and Douglas fir. I also import white and red oak, chestnut, beech, elm and walnut from the Midwestern states. Some of this wood is over 200 years old and some has come from Maine forests that might have been growing when the first European settlers arrived.
There are advantages and disadvantages when working with vintage wood. It takes twice as much wood and twice the labor to produce a piece of furniture, because of the need to work around and with defects. I am continuously looking for hard-to-find and increasingly more expensive vintage materials.
On the plus side, vintage wood has an intensity of color due to oxidation over the years. And it typically has a tighter grain structure, an attribute of wood from old growth forests.
The furniture I design is original and modern yet enduring in its dimension and utility. My tables achieve an antique quality without being reproductions. Vintage wood is my inspiration and a connection to my ancestry. It seems to be what “winds my clock.” Hopefully it will be my legacy.
Michael Perkins
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"Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—I took the one less traveled by, and that has made all the difference." -Robert Frost
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