OUT OF THE WOODS

Matt Steed with a luxury custom dining room chair in his Woods Road Furniture shop. Photo by Elizabeth Neal.

OUT OF THE

Precision crafting with Kitty Hawk’s

Woods Road Furniture

BY STEVE HANF

As 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 offi ce 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 fi ve-year-old.

“The fi rst 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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From tables to chairs and everything in between, Matt’s custom works of art can be found in homes and businesses all over the beach. Photos courtesy of Leah and Matt Steed. trying to make a side table or something. I wish I’d saved some of that!”

He also remembers his dad letting him know when he was doing something wrong – but mostly, Matt just kept watching and learning. Between his father and Skip Haynes, a longtime Harmony employee, the two men were instrumental in teaching Matt how to use the tools of the trade.

Eventually, Matt worked his way up to building things such as skateboard ramps and smaller pieces of furniture for personal use. And at hundreds of job sites up and down the beach, he watched his father install cabinet after cabinet.

“I never really thought I was going to do anything other than cabinets,” Matt says about his early career path.

But there was just one small problem.

“I hated building cabinets,” he admits with a laugh. “To me, it felt like making a box over and over again.”

Instead, Matt dabbled in furniture-making as a hobby in his 20s. He also gave wood fl ooring a shot for a year, before realizing he disliked that even more than building cabinets. Then, after they got married, Leah encouraged him to build some furniture for their own house, and Matt gradually found himself designing tables.

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Matt works inside his Kitty Hawk Woods Road shop – the same space his father ran Harmony Cabinets for decades while Matt was growing up (left, photo by Elizabeth Neal). Other examples of Matt’s unique take on furniture that’s unmistakably artistic (above, photos courtesy of Leah and Matt Steed).

Fast-forward to today, and chances are you’ve sat at one of his works of art. In addition to providing massive dining room tables to accommodate huge beach houses, he’s also done custom pieces for restaurants such as Steamers, Mako’s and the Outer Banks Brewing Station.

So how cool is it to sit at one of his own tables when he goes out to eat? Meh, maybe more like “stressful.”

“I tend to sit there and pick them apart; I’m never really satisfi ed,” Matt explains. “I can have a lot of anxiety about making furniture – and I need to make them just right so I don’t get that anxiety.”

That goal of expert craftsmanship came from his dad. And Matt developed his artistic eye thanks to his mom, Alta, an artist and former art teacher.

“I always appreciated how she pulled creativity out of her students when she taught art lessons,” Matt says. “Her approach was to say, ‘Sometimes this needs to be practical, but it can also be very beautiful.’ There’s a lot of stuff in furniture that’s creative – but a casual person walking by might not see that right away.” That happens to be the case when it comes to one of Matt’s most recent projects: designing and hand crafting dining room chairs for a client who liked what he built for her beach house so much that she commissioned him to do some pieces for her Chicago home. To the untrained eye, they might simply be considered attractive chairs. But the craftsmanship involved in getting the curve of the legs and the back support just right can take hundreds of hours.

In some pieces, though, the artistry is impossible to miss. Over the past couple of years, Matt’s enjoyed working with epoxy in order to make tables and other functional items with brilliant splashes of color. It can be challenging and time consuming, but seeing a dining room table crafted with a couple slabs of sycamore and a river of jet-black epoxy makes for a great conversation starter over dinner.

Raw materials litter his shop as well, including everything from giant tree rings to walnut – his favorite wood to use – plus odds and ends he stumbles across online or that people have gifted him. His current dining room table is made from wood he found in East Lake. Other examples of his work showcase materials such as red oak and poplars from the Raleigh area. For Matt, the variety only adds another dimension of depth and character to each and every piece.

And as much fun as it is getting a giant table to the third fl oor of a beach house, Matt and his crew have also pivoted toward making smaller pieces in recent years – things such as side tables, bunk beds and even a bookcase for a pilot that is an unmistakable nod to the original 1903 Wright Flyer.

“I’m still trying to develop my own style,” Matt explains. “Whenever someone comes in and they don’t know what they want exactly, usually it’s just blind faith that we’re going to make them something nice – and it’s fun because I’ve been doing this long enough now that people just trust me.”