Built to Last

Trained by old-world masters in France, Walter Whiteley ’67 has been handcrafting furniture for nearly 50 years.

Upon returning to the United States in the mid-1970s from France, where he had apprenticed as a furniture maker, Walter Whiteley ’67 learned a lesson about his new craft. Its message was was harsh but true.

“If you have a plumbing problem, you are definitely going to call a plumber,” he says, recalling the realization, “but not everyone needs to have a piece of furniture made or restored.”

Overcoming that reality, Whiteley has carved out a career as durable as one of his chests of drawers. But approaching a halfcentury in business, he wonders if he is the last of a dying breed and, if so, who in the future will restore, let alone create, the traditional reproductions he specializes in – the type of furniture capable of lasting generations and becoming beloved family heirlooms.

“There are fewer and fewer people who do what I do,” Whiteley says. “Schools today don’t even get into teaching restoration. In general I think my children’s generation is less interested in formal furniture, and the pieces most people buy today won’t last from one generation to the next.”

Unlike today’s disposable, factory-produced furniture, Whiteley’s work is built to last. During his long career, he’s seen his original pieces survive their owners, and he hopes they will last well beyond that.

When it’s well cared for and built soundly with high-quality materials, furniture can last decades. Recently, a local businessman asked Whiteley if he could fix a rocking chair that had fallen out of the man's pickup truck. Whiteley determined the chair was made in York, Pennsylvania, where he lives and maintains his workshop, and that it was built in the late 1860s, meaning it had survived the administrations of twenty-eight or twenty-nine American presidents. Whiteley’s job was to ensure it would see a thirtieth.

The fall had shattered the chair into “umpteen pieces,” Whiteley said. “It was truly a mess.” Multiple grafts were needed to restore the chair to one piece. Whiteley also had to create an entirely new crest rail, the top rail of the chair’s back. For the longtime craftsman, this was gratifying work.

About five decades earlier, when he was a novice just beginning to learn his craft, Whiteley certainly couldn’t fashion a crest rail, and he probably didn’t even know what one was. He had never taken a single shop class when he arranged, in the early 1970s, for a trial week at old-world furniture makers Lacombe & Lacombe in Rodez, France. At the time, Whiteley was living there with his French wife, whom he had met a couple of years earlier while traveling abroad. The trial turned into a three-year apprenticeship, giving him the opportunity to learn time-honored techniques from master craftsmen.

“I knew that I wanted to do something with my hands,” Whiteley said. “Working with wood seemed like a viable way to express that desire. The more I got into it, the more I realized that I wanted to pursue it, but it was a novel adventure for me.”

Today, his business is split between restoration and custom building. For the latter, some customers hire him to reproduce furniture of a specific style or time period. Others come to him having found a piece of furniture that does not fit into their living space but they feel they cannot live without. Whiteley customizes similar pieces for them, with dimensions better suited to their homes.

Sometimes customers want a piece made with particular hardware or their preferred types of wood. Whiteley has been working with wood for so long – indigenous varieties mostly, such as cherry and walnut, as well as maple and birch for accents – that he can identify varieties on sight. While more and more mass-produced furniture is made of wood composite or plastic, these cheaper materials sacrifice qualities that lend dining room tables, rolltop desks and other heirloom-worthy pieces their beauty, uniqueness, and durability.

No matter what type of wood it’s made from, Whiteley can work on a single piece of furniture for weeks or even months. When his work is complete, he finds pleasure in delivering the products to his customers.

“I’m happy to get them into the home they’re destined to be part of,” he says.

In earlier eras, furniture makers weren’t jacks-of-all-trades like Whiteley but instead were artisans specializing in tasks such as carving or turning.

“What’s different now is that you as an individual have to incorporate all of those gestures,” Whiteley says. “I need to be relatively skillful in all of those areas.”

For having fashioned such a long career, Whiteley owns surprisingly little of the furniture he has made. Especially early on, operating his business left little time to create for himself, although that has recently begun to change. A few of his pieces have joined the furniture he and his wife brought over from France, as well as what they inherited from his grandmother. One chair, which predates the Declaration of Independence and was built in Philadelphia in 1760, is particularly prized.

“It’s testament to the proper joinery that it’s lasted this long,” Whiteley says. n