Heirloom quality

The wood is subtle in its beauty but the longer you look the more you see, as with a fine painting or thoughtful poem. The curve of natural grain lines, marking the life and years of trees turned cabinets, are painstakingly fitted together like a puzzle, the details of each milled piece matching even in the mitered corners till the cabinets look as if they grew together that way.

It takes time and craftsmanship to create cabinets that feel like fine furniture. That’s why Mark and Sally Hamilton commissioned Spokane born Jonathan Gay, owner of Acadie Woodworks, to design their kitchen remodel and craft cabinets.

“They are really nice, like art, like heirloom furniture,” says Mark Hamilton of the finished cabinetry. “He worked really close with us, talked with us about what we wanted, looked at the furniture in our house. My wife and I enjoy craftsman stuff so that is what he made.”

It is a level of customization rarely found outside the most high-end homes but gaining in popularity as more people shy from the cookie cutter economy of mass produced products. By contrast, Gay takes the cabinets from inception to installation for people who appreciate details discovered over years of living with the woodwork, details like how he planed the wood so that its very imperfections become its beauty.

“The wood is really rich and alive,” says Sally Hamilton, adding that they didn’t get granite countertops because they would have detracted from the cupboards, which are the kitchen’s focal point.

Gay’s love of the wood and the work are evident as he strokes the tight grains of a bench seat created for a small nook in the Hamiltons’ kitchen.

“It is a quiet joy with a classic aesthetic,” he says with an understated quietness that matches the bench. “When finished it has a calm feel with nothing disturbing to your eye.”

Always someone who enjoyed working with his hands, Gay first discovered his aptitude for cabinetry while putting himself through college at the University of Washington. He worked in a small Seattle cabinet shop, studying furniture-making philosophy on his own while studying history at the university.

After graduation he applied and was accepted to the prestigious College of the Redwoods in northern California to study the art of fine furniture and cabinet making in a program founded by James Krenov, who says “if one pays enough attention to the richness of wood, to the tools, to the marvel of one’s own hands and eye, all these things come together so that a person’s work becomes that person; that person’s message.”

After perfecting the art of cabinet and furniture making, Gay returned to Seattle, often making new woodwork fit seamlessly in turn of the century homes. But he longed to return home to Spokane, which he did this January, not long after the birth of his first child.

Here he is again turning the bounty of the forest – a literal translation of acadie – into woodworks of art, his cabinets speaking his message of quiet joy in every detail.