Wood Mill Lab engineers enduring magic into custom furniture!
Wood Mill Lab has furnished elegant flourishes at Atlanta restaurants such as Bar Blanc, Aziza and Little Sparrow since opening on the Upper Westside in 2014.
Owners Chris Hagen and Jeff Chambers have built custom bars, tables and other fixtures for commercial spaces as far away as Scotland. For the Woodlark Hotel in Portland, Oregon, they crafted a 30-foot-long lighted cabinet in eight sections to be assembled on site by workers they never met.
But the hospitality industry feels stale for Hagen, 64, and Chambers, 48. All-consuming commercial jobs that can last two years hurt the quality of life Hagen has with his partner, artist Lee Arnett, and Chambers has with his wife, Alisa, and their two children.
So Wood Mill Lab is emphasizing residential work for more creativity, fun and completion within a month. “We’re taking some of what we’ve learned and putting that into our residential furniture,” Hagen says. “We’re building something that lasts generationally that doesn’t look like it’s a plastic piece of crap.”
Native Midwesterners Chambers, who designs and fabricates the furniture, and Hagen, who applies the finishes, know all about generational quality.
Chambers’ family worked as tool and die makers for General Motors, and he brings the aesthetics of car interiors to furniture. He also uses screws and bolts collected by a grandfather who “would cross a parking lot if he saw something shiny.”
Hagen’s grandfather was an industrial engineer who took apart motors for fun and designed fiberglass boats. He finds inspiration in old-school wood finishes that preserve yachts’ beauty.
“We both come from art backgrounds, and making functional art is really what we do,” Hagen says.
They met in 2003 in the finishing department of furniture importer Pierce Martin. Both had come to Atlanta in the 1990s, Hagen to work, and Chambers to study at the Atlanta College of Art, where he graduated in 2001.
After Pierce Martin fell victim to the 2008 recession, Hagen took tools and equipment and started ID Lab, a furniture refurbishing business. When customers sought custom furniture instead, he launched Wood Mill Lab with Chambers.
“I can make anything pretty on the outside, but I need him for the inside,” Hagen says.
Chambers embraced “lab” in the company’s name because of the “mad scientist” element of their work.
“If I can draw it, then we can make it,” Chambers says. “If I can see it and blow it apart in my head and see the parts, then there’s nothing that we can’t make.”
Problem solving is the core of their projects, from a wine room in which bottles seem to float to an outdoor kitchen that resists weathering and a multiuse cabinet built into a 1971 Volkswagen bus.
“We make furniture that your family will fight over for generations,” Chambers says. “We don’t want to make something that you’re going to throw away.”
That quality comes at a price. A coffee table could cost $3,000 to $26,000. “We are definitely high end,” Hagen says. “But we work with highend materials, and we produce a high-end result.”
He says only in the past five years have they “gotten really good.” Their residential clients benefit from that skill and from their portfolio of unbuilt designs.
“We’re excited about the next 10 years, and we’re excited about doing it in Atlanta,” Hagen says. “It’s a really, really great market for makers.”
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PHOTO: Erik Meadows
