Matt Steed with a luxury custom dining room chair in his Woods Road Furniture shop. Photo by Elizabeth Neal.
FOLKS
Precision crafting with Kitty Hawk’s Woods Road Furniture
BY STEVE HANF
As
OUT OF THE
the action unfolds on the television screen, Matt Steed’s eyes are drawn to a shapely leg – or, seconds later, an alluring chest. Captivated by the beauty before him, Matt presses pause on the remote. “My wife will be like, ‘You just saw a piece of furniture in the background, didn’t you?’” Matt says with a laugh. “And I’ll say, ‘Oh, yeah. Hold on, I’ve gotta go back and take a picture of it.’” You can almost picture Leah rolling her eyes as she waits for their movie to resume, but Matt can’t help himself. Making furniture, and channeling the artistry behind it, is in his blood. “I’ll get all these ideas, and I keep a catalog of things that I want to make,” he says. “Then, when someone comes in, I’ll start pitching ideas, and if something sticks, that’s cool – next, we’ll try to make it our own.” Matt runs Woods Road Furniture out of the same shop where his dad, Glenn, turned Harmony Cabinets into a household name during decades of building on the Outer Banks from the mid-‘80s until 2015. A photo in Matt’s office shows him with his father outside the shop just off the bypass in Kitty Hawk. Now 40, Matt fondly recalls those early days in the family business as a five-year-old. “The first thing I did was check the trash cans to see if there was enough of any one material to make anything, because my dad didn’t want me to use fresh stuff,” Matt says. “I’d just start screwing little pieces of wood together,
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