Photography by Kevin A. Roberts
If tables could talk, they would speak the stories of those who gathered around them: the whispers of newlyweds, the echo of a toddler’s laughter, the angst of teenagers, the joy of families gathered in celebration, and the sorrowful times shared.
Jimmy Farah, owner of Rustic Grain (9420 Watson Industrial Park, 314-422-4667, rusticgrain.com), remembers helping his father build the family’s poplar dining table when he was just 12 years old, growing up on the East Coast. “The wood was locally harvested,” he says. “We still sit at that table today, 18 years later, when we visit my parents in Connecticut. It’s a family heirloom.”
Today, Farah’s company creates residential and commercial tables, custom furniture, feature walls, and architectural accents from wood reclaimed from century-old Midwest barns. He believes the fine pieces that they craft today will become tomorrow’s family treasures.
One of the firm’s most recent projects—a large kitchen and bath addition to a Webster Groves home built as a farmhouse in 1874—uses beams and custom-made furniture, doors and accents from the Pogue barn, circa 1857, dismantled and reclaimed in 2013 in Edwardsville, Illinois. The homeowner contacted Rustic Grain after admiring the furniture and other elements that Farah created for Juniper restaurant. She and her husband recently moved back to the handsome home, built in Victorian vernacular style, after an absence of 14 years. (They so loved the house, they’d decided to keep it and rent it out after being transferred to the West Coast years ago.)
Victorian vernacular architecture, which blossomed in Webster Groves from the 1870s to 1895, relied on local materials, labor, and building traditions. It incorporated the environmental, technological, and cultural values of place. For both Rustic Grain and the homeowners, extending the vernacular tradition to the new addition matched the ethos of each.
Farah knows the histories of all the barns he’s reclaimed. He ties each barn to the pieces that his firm creates through unique brass markers that are prominently attached to the work. “We’re not the only firm building with upcycled barn-wood,” he says, “but the quality of our work coupled with our use of technology and storytelling make us unique.”
When people enter the numbers on their markers into Rustic Grain’s website, the history, location, and photos of the barn used in the piece display on screen. “Every barn owner’s story is unique,” Farah says. “We hear about how grandparents played in the barn and about the animals that lived there. When people donate a barn and we dismantle it, they know that piece of their history isn’t going to end up in a landfill. People give up barns because they’re no longer useful. As they age, the structures become more of a liability. The farm families can go to our site and see all the ways we’ve used their barns. That resonates with people who donate a barn and with the customer who buys a piece made from the barn. Almost half of our farm families want a memento, a chair, or a table—an heirloom.”
The woods used in the Webster Groves project show the ravages of age, the perfect circles made by carpenter bees that sheltered in the wood, the knotholes shrunk to uneven whorls, and the fingernail-thin cracks of age in beams. The marks of the makers remain in carved Roman numerals that indicated which pieces joined together and in the scrawl of pencil noting the year that the barn was built.
Farah and his crew of woodworkers, architects, artists, and craftsmen thoughtfully study the woods before they assemble the wall cladding, the beams, and the custom-made media cabinet to ensure that the best design emerges.
In the final days of the addition build-out, two workers maneuver the custom-built media cabinet, sans doors, into place at the Webster Groves home. They level it and set glides under the base. The doors will be hung, the details completed, the brass markers added the following day.
A handsome chevron table, built at Rustic Grain’s studio in Crestwood, sits in a sunny cove of the kitchen. The softly burnished top shows the pattern of light and dark, rough and smooth. The chairs are yet to come. The people who will gather here will make new memories around this table, built from woods of an earlier century.
