I started Fabulous Furniture in 1973, but I started working with wood long before then. When I was twelve I used to do my paper route and then ride over to the park to look for fallen trees. I would carry them home in my press basket and carve them into forms. Some of those original pieces are still at Fabulous Furniture.

All the work you see here is made right at our workshop and showroom in Boiceville, NY. We do our own logging, looking for trees too big and misshapen to be feasible for other loggers. Many of the trees we use are rotten or dead, and both of these "defects" produce incredible grain patterns. We bring the trees back to the shop and decide if they should be cut on the conventional sawmill, which can cut only 19" wide, or the chainsaw mill, which requires more man power but can cut a board up to 50" inches wide. Some of our tables are made from one piece of wood, 30" to 50" wide, which is unheard of anywhere else.

We use only quality hardwoods: black walnut, butternut, black cherry, and a rare, diseased form of hard maple called spalted maple. Spalted maple resembles a pen-and-ink drawing or a finely grained piece of marble.

After the trees have been sawn into boards, they are kiln dried. Then we store the wood in airtight containers so the moisture content stays stable.

We put in many hours of handwork and use many types of sanders and machines to bring out the grain an inherent beauty of the wood. We then put several coats of a state-of-the-art finish that can easily withstand alcohol, water, and heavy usage. It requires no care beyond simple dusting. Nothing is stained or dyed: all the variations occur naturally in the wood.

Our inlays of butterflies, lizards, and other animals are done by first cutting the animal from a different piece of wood, tracing the pattern on the tabletop, and then carving for an exact fit. It is a slow and tedious process that took many years to perfect.

My father called himself an antique dealer, but in reality he was a junk collector. After his death in 1987, my mother asked me to remove the piles of metal he had accumulated over the years. On my way to the town dump, I looked in the rear-view mirror and realized that these seemingly unusable scraps were really a gold mine. I began to weld them together that summer, and have found that my father certainly had a good eye.

I love wood and metal, but in my heart I'm a car freak. The Cadillacs of the 1950's are the cars I love the most. I've collected dozens of them over the years, and have incorporated them into furniture and sculpture, hoping to keep them from going to the crusher (perhaps the most evil piece of machinery ever invented). I have made cedar chests, entertainment units, beds, lights, and other pieces of usable furniture out of these once rusting piles of metal. I am, after all, my fathers son.

- Steve Heller