Space Effective Furniture

Manchester Wood prides itself on producing small, compact furniture with storage solutions in several styles of locations for the home. We’ve released several top sellers this past year that our ideal in Apartments, Condominiums, Senior Homes, and those tight spaces needing to be utilized.

Check out our Cabinet Furniture

Our Chairside Storage Table is an item we discuss often, as it has been praised the most by customers for it’s convenient uses. Also our Compact Desk is great for paying bills, or for a tight computer space, and handling other basic dealings for the home.

Jelly Cabinets have also been taking off, a classic design with tons of storage space. Our Tall Double Jelly Cabinet was actually recently selected by ABC’s World News with Diane Sawyer’s Made in America series.

For mobility, our Multipurpose Cart and TV Tray Tables have always been a great choice. Both items have been classic products over the past 25 years for us. We’ve experienced nothing but positive feedback since their introduction.

From the aesthetic prospective, our Underwindow Bookcase and Periodical End Table are the best fit. The Underwindow Bookcase is beautifully designed to store your possessions while giving you a clear view to see the beauty that surrounds you outside – which at times can be a critical way to gain inspiration.

Whatever you’re looking for when it comes to furniture, especially space effective pieces, please consider Manchester Wood – crafted in America from Solid Hardwood.

Check out our online catalog here: http://www.manchesterwood.com

Classic Comfort with Room for Fun!

Traditional rooms in most homes call for a more enlivened spirit, touching on vintage as well as current styles. We mentioned in a previous post, placing comfort before formality has been a growing trend in the new century.

At Manchester Wood our ever-growing Contemporary Collection seeks the common ground between style and comfort for all when enjoying a room. Whether with our coffee, sofa, or end tables and media stands to present your entertainment systems, we trust you’ll find what you’re looking for.

Antique and old traditional lines influence many of our designs. When we add a new “updated” flavor to these items of influence it adds a familiarity, but more importantly, a forward outlook – an important aspect that furniture should carry in your home.

If your family is growing, many of these traditional formal living or dining rooms become “all-purpose” rooms, and we totally understand. It’s important for all of us to create! Especially for our youth, an all-purpose or “great” room makes perfect sense – a shared space for all to enjoy.

With our step stools, cabinets for storage, and children’s furniture, Manchester Wood prides itself on finding items that suite your needs for classic comfort in your home!

Thanksgiving

We’re approaching Thanksgiving. For many, it’s a time of celebration with family and friends. Which may mean for you supplying not only food, but also the means to stretch your space to accommodate company.

Here at Manchester Wood we have a few items we think would make great purchases this holiday season as the family visits for Thanksgiving.

Our always-popular TV Tray Tables make great additional space for dining, as well as our Gourmet Kitchen Island and Mission Carts, which make a great buffet or beverage station.

Regardless of these listed products and the over 100 more items we produce, our honest best wishes extend to you and yours this holiday season.

As always, Manchester Wood exclusively uses American produced solid hardwood lumber and craft our solid wood furniture in a small manufacturing plant at the foothills of the Adirondacks in upstate New York.

Entertainment Consoles: Introducing our 21st Century Living

Furniture changes as we do.

Our culture constantly moves and transitions to new popular ideas.

Contemporary Media Stand (shown with Chestnut finish)

Technology has greatly evolved in our living rooms, from once large and bulky television sets to now sleek, thin, lightweight flat screens. Our entertainment products are rapidly changing. Less has become more, and that includes the huge, clunky entertainment consoles finding their way out the door.

Shaker Entertainment Stand (shown with Golden Oak finish)

At Manchester Wood we’ve been designing and prototyping several versions of new entertainment furniture pieces, finalizing with three prized items for any living room.

First, our Shaker Entertainment Console, a shaker inspired conception, but with more flare and creative design, including a center cabinet with open storage space on either side to display your music or film collection.

Farmhouse Media Center (shown with Golden Oak finish)

We continue the country living theme with our next piece, the Farmhouse Media Center. It finds similarity to the Shaker Entertainment Console, but features two cabinets for your collections as well as convenient shelving for your cable box, DVD player, and surround sound controls.

Our Contemporary Media Stand is the most elegant piece of our new installments to entertainment furniture. It’s smooth and lustrous appearance finds appeal far beyond the country living theme. The simplicity and fine detail in design makes this a very alluring item in any room of entertainment.

As three items enter the market, we continue to strive for more in future collection work, but we find pleasure in discussing and providing you the fruit of our labor.

All of our products are proudly made in America with local solid hardwood to boot.
We hope you find what you’re looking for.

To view this collection, click here.

Shaker Furniture

A.J. Macdonald once commented Shaker furniture was originally designed in heaven and that the patterns had been transmitted to the Shaker people by angels. +

I can imagine that feeling Macdonald once had regarding early pilgrims of America started their new lives in a world open to possibility. This furniture line shows the religious order and simplicity of the time.

Shaker styled furniture has craft traditions rooted heavily in colonial New York and New England. Farmers, Mechanics, Small Tradesmen made up most of the consumer base for Shaker Furniture in early America. A humble, basic product, with a thoughtful development of design and craftsmanship is the essential character.

At Manchester Wood, our Shaker Collection touches on the history of its lineage in design adding contemporary appeal for the 21^st Century.

We hope you find the basic needs in life, especially in furniture, as much fun as we do!

+John Humphrey Noyes. History of American Socialisms, pp. 602-603.

A Manchester Wood Collection: Jelly Cabinets

The land in America is abundant, no doubt about that.

Early in the 19^th century the United States started to find it’s identity.

Immigrants, stragglers, hustlers, and revelers looking to answer this thing we call Life.

Ready to grab it by the horns, and ride it   to death, laughing in victory.

Jelly Cupboards and Cabinets became a household staple to our early pilgrimage.

The popularity of the item grew from New England, spreading as far West it could.

It wasn’t a hard sales pitch.

By 1830, everyone seemed to be eating jelly.

Grape, Mint, even Jalapeno jelly in the Southwest would find storage in the kitchen.

At Manchester Wood we participate in the tradition of Jelly Cabinets, and are proud to offer these pieces, a part of early American culture.

Click here to see our collection.

Where do you put your stuff?

“That’s all your house is, it’s a pile of stuff with a cover on it…”

George Carlin jokingly (perhaps not) once conveyed about our lives.

We all, generally speaking, do love stuff, and we do need places for that stuff.

Our Storage Solutions line is our answer to that call.

We’ve focused on space efficiency and functionality along with style in storing items. From the early stages of our company we produced the popular Multipurpose Cart, a Periodical End Table with Magazine Rack, and more recently our deceiving stuff holding piece, the Chairside Storage Table. Perfect for hiding away most possessions in a classy end table fashion.

“The Mill,” which is what most of our employees call our factory, is located near one of the richest slate deposits in the World. Glacial masses imprinted our land with beautifully colored slate thousands of years ago, leaving us to work with it.

We’ve used local slate on many pieces of furniture, and one of those pieces includes the Slate Top Console Table. It’s a magnificent piece of furniture with great storage capacity.

So that’s our take on stuff, although it doesn’t define us, we do like holding onto things we cherish, which reaches far beyond furniture… and stuff.

Check out our Storage Solutions section here.

Ups and Downs: Life at “The Mill”

I’ve just started painting our lunchroom. Revamping it after years of hard use.

It’s amazing how many moving parts there are at a factory. The constant motions, change, fixing, rebuilding, but the community of it, remains the same forever.

Sure like every relationship, it has its ups and downs, hard times and good.

It helps when something comes along and humbles you. Waking you up from the everyday repetitive loop you can linger in.

Last week, we had a spontaneous combustion fire here at “the mill,” our factory and home to more than fifty employees.

The event surely humbled and awoke us.

We were very fortunate, walking away with minimal damage.

Life can remind you in harsh and subtle ways that in fact it can end or change at any moment.

On that dreaded Sunday night, anxiously racing over, we found several employees coming in at different times to help.

No time cards clocked, working into the late hours of the night only to be back Monday morning, just a  few short hours later.

This week we wish to thank all of our employees for their dedication to Manchester Wood. Also to all manufacturing companies in America who fight everyday to survive in our country.

To the hardworking and downtrodden, your fellow man thanks you.

Also to our Mother Earth for giving us such amazing resources!

The Re-invention of Old: TV Tray Tables

America’s Wood

One of those early American settlers was “Bud” Hillerich. In 1880, at 14, he’d begin to learn his father, Johann Fredrich Hillerich trade by serving as an apprentice in his woodworking shop.
His father went mostly by J.F. Hillerich, and was a German born citizen, looking for a fresh start in America. He was proud of his young boy, and let him work on side projects in his shop.

At 18, Bud went to work on a baseball bat for the company’s first professional ballplayer, Pete Browning, who played for the Louisville Eclipse. Browning nicknamed the bat “The Louisville Slugger.”

The popularity grew, orders started coming in all over the country. Johann changed the woodshops name to “J.F. Hillerich & Son.” “The Louisville Slugger,” baseball’s premier bat, was born.
From Babe Ruth, Joe DiMaggio, Ted Williams, to today’s stars, “The Louisville Slugger” remains the prized possession of the best hitters in Baseball.
What does this have to do with Manchester Wood and our furniture? We use the same sturdy, long lasting White Ash in our furniture as they’ve used all these years on their bats.
White ash is considered the “premiere species” of North American ashes, for being hard, strong, exceeding bending qualities, and easily worked in our mill.
“The Louisville Slugger,” web site states, “Pound per pound, ash is the strongest timber available. Ash has a flexibility that isn’t found in other timbers like maple. It tends to flex rather than break, which gives a strong ‘sweet spot’ in terms of breakage. Ash is lighter than maple, giving a wider range of large barrel models.”

Although we don’t use our durable, long-last White Ash for home runs at the ballpark, we do on our indoor items, giving customers products lasting for generations at a fair price.