Artisan

PHIL HAGEN

>>> Western Heritage Furniture, Jerome, Arizona

Western Heritage Furniture pieces include desks, credenzas and bookcases.

If you're looking for "Made in America" these days, you'll be happy to know it still exists in at least one place: in the middle of Arizona's rugged rim country, up a steep hill, in an old high-school gymna­sium in a ghost town called Jerome. Here's where you'll find Western Heritage Furniture, where the long-lost spirit of hand craftsmanship is very much alive.

You'll also discover the other half of Tim McClellan's secret: that the furniture is made of America, too. He calls his chief material "ghostwood," because the pine, maple, redwood, cherry or whatever lumber his scouts find has already lived a full life — as part of a tobacco barn in Missouri or an old house right here in Jerome — before it gets re-crafted into high-end lines of desks, dressers and buffets. Like the end table whose tag says its wood was reclaimed from the 130-year-old Ladd family farm in Ankeny, Iowa, each piece comes with a story.

"The wood from these old buildings is like finding pieces of gold," McClellan says. "It has character and his­tory that speak volumes." He considers the original trees, which may have sprouted a thousand years ago, part of the lore. "The buildings have the ghost of an old sequoia in California or a ponderosa pine in Colorado," he says. "Then the spirit also comes through the people who used the buildings — their spirit is being expressed through this furniture."

Buyers also seem to like the fact that Western Heritage pieces are built to add fresh generations of spirit, too. Thus the company motto, "Building Tomorrow's Antiques Today." Under the menacing one-eyed watch of the old Marauder mascot painted on the gym wall, the shop produces each piece the sturdiest way known: manually, from the milling to the mortise-and-tenon joinery.

"There isn't a piece we make that can't be thrown off a two-story building," says Tim McCune, McClellan's partner and vice president of marketing.

You certainly wouldn't want to do that after seeing the Western Heritage showroom, located above the gym. The beautifully captured character of the ghostwood, plus adornments of copper, forged iron and hand-dyed leather, give each piece an original, early-American look.

But the out-of-the-way showroom in this quiet artisan enclave only attracts a few tourists a day. Western Heri­tage mainly sells its five collections out of 120 various stores in 28 states, including Robb & Stucky in Arizona, Great Rooms in Nevada, Foreign Traders in New Mexico and Howard Lorton Galleries in Colorado. Custom orders are also encouraged. And business is booming: Through the first nine months of 2007, the firm had already shipped more than 2,000 pieces — easily surpassing the total of the entire previous year.

McClellan has come a long way since 1991, when he was selling cars in Oregon and, on a bet, made a bed out of logs he'd found in a slash pile. He sold his first piece for $250. The know-how stemmed from his boyhood days in West Vir­ginia, where he spent his free time building "teepees and stuff" on his family's 100 acres. A high-school shop teacher later ingrained in him the keys to woodworking (such as quality joinery) that remain the foundation of Western Heritage.

The wood furniture is augmented with the addition of forged iron, copper and leather.

These days, McClellan has become more of a boss and mentor, having passed on his knowledge and style to the 19 woodworkers, journeymen and apprentices now on the team. "I've always preached the mission, and now they're the ones who protect it," he says. "In fact, I think the product we deliver now is much better than what I used to build myself."

Western Heritage is a family more than a factory, where character is the key quality in the hiring process, McCune says. The result is a "brotherhood" of workers (four are McClellan kin) who care about their craft and each other. "Our customers are a priority, of course," he says. "But our workers are number one."

McCune, a former delivery-boat captain, was the first key hire back in 1999, when a partnership was born out of destiny. Both men are the same age (38), both were born in Florida, and both wound up in Jerome by chance. And then there's name similarity, which in a larger town (Jerome's population is about 400) might mess with the mailman — especially since the two Tims are next-door neighbors.

But it's their synergistic talents — McClellan's craftsmanship and McCune's salesmanship — that has yin-and-yanged Western Heritage from a one-man custom-furniture shed to a full-court wholesale manufacturer in less than a decade.

Though most of the day is spent tending to the busi­ness side, McClellan does keep his signature line of furniture for himself. It includes his masterpiece, the Presidential desk, which he designed to "capture the American West." He rounded up wood that had national symbolism (buckboard from an old wagon, cherry wood from Wisconsin), then added accents such as buffalo-head nickels, leather trim and even copper from the gutters of the Jerome gym.

The desk was showcased in the prestigious juried competition at the Western Design Conference in Cody, Wyoming a few years ago. McClellan didn't win the $10,000 grand prize; he did better — $25,000 from a buyer who fell in love with his work.

Adding a couple of extra zeroes to a sale was a great career booster, but McClellan seems glad mostly because it affords him the ability to sustain a more important idea: the Western Heritage way.

"We do things the slow way around here," he says. "But we're here to build a name that will live on forever. We're here to build a legacy."

Western Heritage Furniture, Jerome, AZ; (800) 616-1424 or www.whf-inc.com.