When it’s time for the wooden touches that make your house a home, there are a few sorts you’ll encounter.

There’s stock, like the tables you find on display in furniture showrooms or cabinets you find stacked floor-to-high-ceiling in the big box home centers.

There’s built-to-order, like the cabinets created for you after styles and layouts have been selected with designers in cabinet showrooms or couches delivered in your choice of upholstery and stain.

And then there’s real custom work, some of which is the one-of-a-kind, impossible-to-duplicate and, well, fabulous.

Anyone who’s ever traveled the stretch of state Route 28 between Boiceville and Kingston with their eyes open has seen “Steve Heller’s Fabulous Furniture.” His rocket ship and other sculptures stand in stark contrast to the woods around them on the north side of the road. They decorate the grounds around his showroom and shop. Of course, his car art, car part furniture and lamps are also immediately recognizable. Heller’s '59 Cadillac (the year with the absolutely biggest fins, he says) is a sometimes participant on the local car show circuit.

But what does all this have to do with fabulous, one-of-a-kind furniture and furnishings made of wood?

Well, the sculptor is the furniture maker and his passions run strong for both the metal and wood alike. Sometimes the car parts find their way into the furniture.

One-of-a-Kind Wood
For obvious reasons, the woodwork is on display inside. Heller crafts his wooden furniture—desks, tables, chests, stairs, and wooden accessories such as frames, boxes and even cutting boards of cherry, maple and walnut. Most of the material comes from within a 25-mile radius of his showroom and shop, and like the work itself the wood is one-of-a kind—often too misshapen to be of use to anyone else.

These odd-shaped trees, translate into angular furniture and fixtures generally devoid of right angles or square corners. Of course, as they say about snowflakes, every tree is unique. But traditional lumber is milled to be uniform—even if dimensional lumber is now a quarter to a half inch smaller than its name would suggest. The higher the grade, the lesser the likelihood of knots, or imperfections of any kind will be present.

For Heller, however, it’s often imperfections from rotten or dead trees that make for perfect raw materials. The notch between the split trunks of a tree becomes a place for a glass inset on a coffee table. The producing angles of a beefy slab of wood become the arched back of a hefty one-of-a-kind chair.

When it comes to walnut, Heller says it’s often the home owner with the tree that’s been dropping its product on the car and driveway that calls for its removal.

Spalted maple, which he describes as resembling a pen-and-ink drawing or finely-grained marble, is common in his work along with other corrupted maple many woodworkers would reject. “A lot of weird things happen to maple that don’t happen to other wood,” says Heller, and weird, in this context, is most assuredly a good thing.

“A lot…of it finds me. Loggers call or stop by and say they have something. I have a lot of contacts,” says Heller. And sometimes it’s a storm that knocks an old tree down that puts logs through his mill. But whatever the source, the result is the same—not your typical wood.

Another unique aspect of Fabulous Furniture’s creations is that fact that Heller works from the often-standing tree to the finished product, he says. “Cabinet makers, they design something to the customer specs. Then they order the lumber,” he says. “I have 10 buildings full of lumber that I’ve already sawn. When we make something it’s all from the same tree. The grain matches.”

An exception to this general rule is when Heller’s furniture is created from wood provided by the customer. “A lot of people have brought me in wood and said this is the siding, or these are the beams from my grandfather’s barn, and they’ve wanted me to make something out of it,” he says. “People have brought me all kinds of stuff. I made a table out of a tree for a guy where as a kid he took an aluminum birdhouse and put it in the crotch of a tree—40 years later we cut down the tree and split it and the birdhouse popped out. The wood didn’t adhere to it and you could see the bird house in the two halves and I made a table base out of it.”

“For another, I have a huge piece of mahogany that their grandfather got out of the docks in Brooklyn…. We’re going to make a little coffee table for him, or a big coffee table,” says Heller.

“I used to spend a lot of time walking the woods and getting trees,” he says. “I’m finally way ahead of myself. I’m probably five or eight years ahead of myself in the amount of lumber I have on hand.”

Fabulous Furniture
“I’ve built everything from kitchens to beds, to staircases and railings. Usually, I just need the dimensions,” he says. “They know that my stuff is what they want. They know that it’s going to fit (in).” Fabulous Furniture has also created armoires, entertainment centers and just about anything else you can think of that would be made of wood.

The Fabulous Furniture showroom, on any given day, has ready-made tables for sale, and they’re priced comparably to cookie-cutter models from more established names in so-called fine furniture like Stickley (“at least it’s oak,” says Heller) and Ethan Allen (that’s just pine, he points out).

Naturally, the possibilities don’t end there.

“I have a showroom, perhaps 100 tables already made and if you like one you can take it home with you,” says Heller. “Or perhaps you say I like this table but I’d like it a bit wider or it’s too crazy for me. We got out and pick a board that’s straighter or wider.”

“The smallest thing we do is trivets. We do a couple small jewelry boxes,” he says. “We produce the most incredible scrap and there’s really nothing (else) to do with it.”

Years ago, massive trees were common in Heller’s work, producing exceptionally broad sections of wood for his creations, but those are getting “way harder to find,” he says.

But before the big slabs, Heller worked with what was regarded as trash by area sawmills—slab wood, the round-edged bark-covered outer parts of the tree trimmed off as logs are squared for further milling. “The way I got into the furniture was all the sawmills used to just throw away those four first slices,” says Heller. “They had mountains of it. Every once in a while they’d either burn it or bury it. It was free for the taking and I started going through the pieces.”

“You’d see houses sided with slab wood. You’d see fences made out of it,” says Heller. One of his first woodworking jobs was the construction of window boxes, or flower boxes if you prefer, made of the slabs, he says.

Today it’s all chipped up for mulch and other products. So while really big trees are harder to come by, slab wood is all but impossible without custom milling. And that’s a possibility at Steve Heller’s Fabulous Furniture.

A Blessing in Disguise
Years ago, trees up to 48 inches in diameter would be cut on a 51-inch chain saw mill Heller had custom built. “We don’t do too much of that anymore,” he says. “I got that machine right before my fire in 1978,” recalls Heller, who was a volunteer fire fighter at the time and among those who fought the blaze. “I was fighting the fire with the guys and one of the fellows said to me, ‘Steve, this is a blessing in disguise.’ I wanted to kill him,” says Heller, who know refers to the fire as that fellow did—a blessing.

“My shop burned down and I was just starting to maybe see a profit, the light at the end of the tunnel. I lived here in the shop and of course I had no insurance,” says Heller. “We lost everything, all of our tools, all of our machinery, all the works in progress—we were making a dining room table and chairs. … The only thing I was able to save was my new chain saw mill.”

The losses, though extensive, erased a structure that posed its own challenges to the creation of unique works in wood. “This place used to be overnight cabins and motels,” says Heller, adding “There were ten little cabins in the back. Over the years we had connected them. It was 12 feet wide and 70 feet long. Every 10 or 12 feet the land slants, so you’d have to step up. It was cobbed together.”

“A year or two later we built a huge cement block building with all new electric. All the machinery we bought was used, but it was much better than the stuff we lost,” he says, adding “I would never have done it. I would never have borrowed the money.”

Hands-On Training
Many hours of handwork go into each piece, with different sorts of sanders and several coats of finish that aid in resisting wear and heavy usage and those hours of effort show in the finished work. “There aren’t too many people who do what I do,” says Heller. “There are no shortcuts.”

Heller has little formal training for this sort of work. He earned a Bachelor’s degree in Psychology years ago, regarding which one can draw their own conclusions. More recently he took a class in welding through the Board of Cooperative Educational Services.

Sophisticated woodworking skills were learned hands-on and working besides others, but his attraction to wood began in childhood, carving downed trees collected from a park near the family home in Queens. “My father was a school teacher. He had a little shop in the basement. He made all the furniture for the house, the dining table, coffee tables, lamps….he was always fixing things,” says Heller.

“I’m a major tinkerer at this point and that’s where I got it from. I see kids nowadays and they’re amazed: ‘What, you can make that? You can do that? You can make that with your hands?’

His parents also had a summer house in Woodstock from the late 1950s, so he was no stranger to the region, but as a young adult Heller traveled west, not north. He lived in San Francisco from 1969 to 1972, and says he liked what felt like a small-town lifestyle. “You could be outside the whole year, “ he says.

“After three years I came back here to visit. I was staying here in Woodstock and one thing led to another,” says Heller. “This place had been abandoned for 10 years when I bought it. Everybody thought I was crazy. It’s been good to me.”

One-of-a-Kind Works of Art
Fabulous Furniture was not created on the commercial studio model, with a lone artistic visionary overseeing the work of multiple apprentice artisans, so it’s Heller you’ll generally find on the other end of the phone or on site in Boiceville. He says a 10-hour day is his norm.

“All my stuff, it’s forever,” says Heller. “It’ll be handed down and handed down and passed around. I know it. I’ve already redone some of my old pieces. The beauty of it is it’s solid wood. We just strip it and sand it and it’s brand new again. I’ve got the children of old customers who say the only piece of furniture in the whole house that they ever liked was that coffee table and I new when I had my own house where I’d be getting that furniture. I’m getting a lot of that now.”

Heller says his customers range from a few well-to-do to those for whom buying a one-of-a kind piece is “a bit of a stretch.”

“You can go to IKEA and buy a coffee table for $89. The wood for that costs me $60,” he says. “Mine is a one-of-a-kind art piece. Every single piece isn’t the most incredible or a masterpiece. They can’t be. But they’re all incredible in their own way,” says Heller.

See Steve Heller’s Fabulous Furniture for yourself at the showroom on Route 28 in Boiceville, open Wednesday through Sunday from 10 am to 6 pm. Call 845 657 6317 for more information. For additional photos of his creations in wood, his sculpture, auto art and other “Fabulous Stuff” visit www.fabulousfurnitureon28.com.