Early on Thanksgiving morning, 2013, All Wood Furniture owners Dave and Doug Duhon got the phone call every small business owner dreads. Their workshop was on fire. By the time the brothers arrived at the sweet potato warehouse in which they had spent twenty years building their business, the circa 1940 building, their tools, and hundreds of pieces of hand-built cypress furniture, were ablaze. They lost everything, and when the sun rose next morning they faced the prospect of starting back pretty much right where Dave had been when he began building furniture in 1993: with $500 bucks and a table saw. But what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. They moved into the old feed barn right next door and, three years later, All Wood Furniture is back, turning out more high quality handmade cypress furniture than ever.
The company
Drive through tiny Carencro and you can’t miss All Wood. The business now occupies four buildings on the site of the town’s original railroad depot, where twenty craftsmen and –women hand-build tables, armoires, bookshelves, hutches and islands, using tens of thousands of board feet of new and recycled cypress wood. In the months since the August floods they’ve needed every inch of space to cater to the demand from folks looking to replace destroyed pressed-wood furniture with better quality items built to last. Dave should know. Over the years his own home in Carencro has taken water twice, so for better or worse, he’s gotten to see first-hand how the furniture he builds holds up to water exposure. Being built almost exclusively from cypress, a wood renowned for its durability, the pieces came through with little or no damage. “Since August we’ve gotten so many calls from Baton Rougeans saying the rest of their furniture’s ruined, but these pieces held up,” notes Doug.
All about the wood
Nowadays All Woods’ craftsmen work almost exclusively in cypress, which Dave loves for its strength, workability, water resistance, and the personality inherent in its many knots and color variations. Doug notes that the company buys as much as 150,000 board feet of wood a year. New cypress from Louisiana and North Carolina arrives by the truckload; recycled stuff salvaged from area barns often shows up in the back of somebody’s pickup truck. Oftentimes a customer will bring in wood from a historic building with a request that a specific piece be built. “Around here we come with a dowry of wood,” says Doug with a laugh. “We have a New York customer with family from the Eunice area. Her grandfather’s grandfather cut cypress out of the [Atchafalaya] Basin and used it to build a huge barn. A few years ago they took the barn down and stored the wood. She’s had us build several pieces out of it and ship them to New York.” Old cypress adds personality to a finished piece, but it presents challenges, too. Dave uses a metal detector to find the old nails, but that won’t pick up the buckshot. Or the carpenter bees, which, Dave notes with a grin, he’s had fly out of lengths of recycled wood as he runs them through the table saw. Most prized are the furnishings made from pecky cypress, which only occurs in trees infected with a fungus that causes pits and channels to develop through the wood. Difficult to find and increasingly rare, pecky cypress can run three times the price of new or old lumber, but if a customer wants a special piece, or brings in wood of their own, the Duhons are happy to work with it.
In tiny Carencro, Dave (left) and Doug Duhon craft handbuilt cypress furniture and ship it all over the country.
The process
Every All Wood Furniture piece is custom-built, and while the Duhons make some stock items to supply the company’s three showrooms in Baton Rouge and Lafayette, around eighty percent are made-to-order. “Folks will come in, look at a piece and say, ‘I like this, but I want such-and-such,’ ” says Dave, who oversees all furniture production, and likes nothing more than the challenge of working out how to build something he hasn’t made before. So while All Wood is best known for its rustic-style dining tables, TV stands, and hutches, if it’s a gun cabinet or a live-edge sideboard you’re after, just ask.
The finish
Natural rot- and insect-resistance makes cypress a versatile wood for indoor and outdoor applications, and All Wood Furniture builds swings, gliders, benches, pergolas and gazebos for making the most of the great outdoors. Another feature that contributes to the durability and longevity of All Wood’s furnishings is the finish. The Duhons use nothing but pre-catalyzed lacquer—which retains the luster of traditional lacquer but is more durable—applied in multiple layers and painstakingly hand-sanded to create a luxurious finish resistant to staining and water intrusion.
The finishing touch
How do you know if an item of cypress furniture is an All Wood piece? Look for the crawfish. Every table made by the Duhons is signed, numbered, and personalized with a stylized crawfish drawn freehand on its underside before the finish is applied. For years Doug drew every crawfish personally, but since his daughter, Rebecca, has joined the operation, she has taken on the task. With this flourishing family business experiencing unprecedented demand from customers looking to add the beauty and durability of handmade Louisiana furniture to their homes, Rebecca is wearing out a lot of sharpies this fall.
All Wood Furniture locations
• 10269 Airline Highway, Baton Rouge. (225) 293-5118
• 2842 N.E. Evangeline Thruway, Lafayette. (337) 269-8800
• 1508 W. Pinhook Road, Lafayette. (337) 262-0059
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