Photography by Kevin A. Roberts
Eric Wilken and Sucheta Bhide
In a very literal sense, Eric Wilken and Sucheta Bhide—owners of The Resplendent Crow—specialize in putting a fresh face onto old things. The vast majority of their business, which they transact through Etsy, involves tricking-out vintage furniture with cool amenities, custom paint jobs, and a strong lacquer. Here’s how they do it—and why people like it.
How did you get interested in furniture-making, Eric?
EW: My family had a cabinet shop in Corvallis, Oregon. Everyone else was playing with G.I. Joes; I got a router and chisels and started helping the family make office furniture. I think that by the time I was 18, I was making libraries. I didn’t plan on continuing with it. I planned to join the military, but I’d torn my ACL and couldn’t duck-walk, so they told me I couldn’t make it through basic training. Which is funny, because now I do ultramarathons and obstacle-course racing. In any case, I then got into aviation cabinetry.
What’s aviation cabinetry?
EW: A client would buy a $70 million private jet and want custom interiors with the finest materials—cutting-edge electronics built into the furniture, everything backlit, remote control for everything. So a designer would design it, and I’d build it. Then I met my wife and joined her business. Now I bring a lot of that stuff into the furniture.
Describe your process when a client brings to you an old piece of furniture to revamp. EW: A lot of times, a client will bring in a vintage piece that they like but it’s not very tall, so I’ll yank the feet off and make new feet and reattach them. Or the client will want new drawers with modern slides, or they have cabinets and want to add drawers. We’ve turned vintage dressers into bar cabinets. We’ve added built-in electronics to vintage furniture so that people can have their iPhones and tablets plugged and keep a nice, clean aesthetic. Anything you can possibly think of to do to furniture, we can do it.
But why would a client prefer a refurbished vintage piece over something brand-new? SB: People have been burned by buying junk furniture. Or they’ve become attached to an older piece of furniture. There’s so much traditional furniture that, if you walk by it, you almost don’t notice it. But then you see that same piece in bright yellow or green, and you’re like, “Where did that come from?!” It’s that same piece of furniture that has stood the test of time, but it’s really fresh. People love it.
How do you decide on the colors?
SB: About 80 percent of our business is custom-matched to paint or wallpaper or other furniture.
For the small slice of your business that is custom-made, how does that process work? EW: A lot of what we build, we start with 3-D modeling. We try to find niches in the industry, then we’ll start the fabrication process on certain things and they grow organically, whether it’s a desk or credenzas. It just depends on what our customers are asking for.
What advice do you have for customers interested in working with you?
SB: The outcome is best if the client is working with a designer, or has done their homework—maybe with Pinterest boards or by sketching a fairly clear idea of a very clear idea of what they want so we can deliver it.
Photography by Kevin A. Roberts, Styling by Lauren Dell
The demand for bamboo furniture is “insane” right now, say Eric Wilken and Sucheta Bhide of The Resplendent Crow. “I didn’t know it was a thing,” says Wilken, who joined his wife’s furniture business in 2018. This beachy style makes up a quarter of their business, they report. The word “bamboo” here doesn’t describe the materials; in fact, no bamboo went into the making of this reproduction piece. Rather, Wilken assembled the custom chest using hardwood, plywood, and some composite materials. The composite material is what allows for the curved fronts. Such curves wouldn’t have been possible during the ’50s and ’60s, he says, when the original style became popular, particularly in the southeastern United States.
