CREATING HARMONY

HARMONY CREATING

When life closes a door, sometimes it opens a drawer. Just ask cabinetmaker Jacob Dehus.

Photos by Cory Godwin • Story by Steve Hanf

The junk drawer. The cabinet fi lled with so many mismatched cups that one wrong move will create an avalanche. For a lot of folks, kitchen cabinets can be scary places. But for some, they can also be beautiful ones.

“Cabinets are just one of those things: Everybody needs them. And they can make or break your house,” says Jacob Dehus of Harmony Cabinets. “But when you walk into a house that has gorgeous, custom, handcrafted cabinetry, you can tell right away.”

Jacob didn’t set out to become one of the top cabinetmakers on the Outer Banks – but when the opportunity presented itself, he jumped at the chance.

The son of an Outer Banks builder and one of six brothers – fi ve of whom are also in the building trades – Jacob grew up dividing his time between Currituck and Maryland. A bit later, he graduated from the Columbus College of Art & Design in Ohio and worked in industrial design before the recession hit in the late 2000s.

A move to western Australia followed, but when the allure of living on the other side of the world wore off , Jacob and his wife, Kara, moved back to the Outer Banks to start a concrete countertop business. It was a good news/bad news proposition. The recession still weighed heavily on the local economy, so jobs were scarce, but Jacob did have the opportunity to meet some important folks in the industry before ultimately deciding to move his family back to Columbus.

His countertop company was a success up in Ohio, but there’s only so long a die-hard surfer can live in the Midwest as well. In 2015, Jacob’s dad called with some big news: Glenn Steed of Harmony Cabinets was ready to retire and move to Hawaii. The business was up for grabs.

“I called Glenn and said, ‘Don’t sell anything yet, I’m fl ying down there!’ I literally got a plane ticket that Thursday night, fl ew down Friday, and stayed for the weekend to check out all his equipment,” Jacob remembers fondly. “We’ve been jamming ever since.”

There was just one small problem: Jacob didn’t actually know anything about cabinets. He bought all kinds of books (“Like Cabinetry for Dummies,” he jokes), but it was Glenn who proved to be the best teacher. Jacob spent three months essentially working for free alongside Steed and his longtime employee Victor “Skip” Haynes to learn the ropes before taking over – and on Glenn’s recommendation after building up Harmony’s reputation for 30 years, Jacob kept the company’s original name intact.

Jacob Dehus of Harmony Cabinets in his current Kitty Hawk shopfront (far left). Above, top to bottom: A cart full of doors, and the inside wall of a drawer that’s been laser etched with the company logo – a signature that authenticates every custom Harmony Cabinets project.

Jacob Dehus Designs, LLC, doing business as Harmony Cabinets, was born.

“I learned so much from that experience,” Jacob says. “Having my design background, and with Glenn and Skip’s understanding of the manufacturing side of it, we’ve been able to make it work. It’s been really cool.”

Business has been booming for the 39-year-old ever since, with Harmony doing nearly 40 jobs a year out of a small shopfront next to Glenn’s son, Matt Steed’s, Woods Road Furniture in Kitty Hawk. Jacob has fi ve full-time employees, including Skip, and hopes to break ground on a new 6,000-squarefoot manufacturing space in Currituck as soon as this fall.

Shifting from concrete to cabinetry has meant a diff erent level of artistry for Jacob, though. There’s no more sculptural work, for instance, but he has found that cabinets, in all their boxy simplicity, can still off er opportunities for creative intricacies in places like fi replace surrounds or mantel-top panels. Jacob also is proud to feature American-made materials, from drawer boxes out of Louisiana to cabinet doors made in Kenly, North Carolina, and top-quality plywood from Greensboro-based Columbia Forest Products.

“You can go to a big box store and get some cheap imported cabinets, and pay nearly as much as you would for custom, high-quality ones,” Jacob says. “But these cabinets are going to last forever. It’s incredible: you can go into houses that Glenn and Skip did 20 years ago, and they still look brand new.

“I love doing the design work and making people happy,” he adds. “That kind of gratifi cation is one of the major things that keeps me going.”