What might be the ultimate furniture commission belongs to Irion Company Furniture Makers, of Christiana, Pa. Over the past nine years it has built for one house some 90 impeccable reproductions of American furniture masterpieces. To view images of the pieces built to date, click here.
What sort of shop could handle this commission with such aplomb?
It's a ten-man shop that integrates excellent hand-tool skills and painstaking fidelity to period construction with efficient machine preparation of stock and moldings. The shop's foundation in sound technique goes back to 1946, when Louis Irion opened The Berwyn Furniture Shop in a suburb of Philadelphia. He filled it with European-trained cabinetmakers--men from Italy, Germany, Hungary and Latvia--and the shop quickly established a reputation for excellent craftsmanship. When Louis retired in the late 1970s, his son Lou took on his clients, operating from a shop in nearby Paoli.
Under the name Irion Company Furniture Makers, Lou's shop specialized in repairs, refinishing, and upholstering as well as reproductions. His craftsmen started young and most learned the craft at Irion. Many found the shop through classified ads in Fine Woodworking. Since the early 1990s, when Lou shifted his attention to lumbering (he now runs Irion Lumber Company), the shop has been run by Kendl Monn, a long-time craftsman at Irion. Monn oversaw the recent commission of masterpieces. Just recently Monn handed the reins of the shop to Todd Felpel, another former Irion craftsman.
