The Modern West Difference

We focus on making furniture as sturdy and beautiful as the Sangre de Cristo Mountain range hovering above our shop.

We start with superior, locally sourced materials and craft our pieces using a blend of modern machinery and age old hand tools. We design for everyday use, use traditional joinery and finishes for durability and longevity, and obsess over getting the details right.

Features you can expect with Modern West furniture:

Frame and Panel Construction

We construct a frame with grooves along the interior edge for beveled panels to slide into for all of our doors and side panels. This allows the natural expansion and contraction inherent to solid wood, ensuring stability in the frame’s glue joints. For added stability, we secure the frame corners with blind mortise and tenon joints.

Solid Wood Drawers and Shelves

Our furniture, including the side and back panels and interior pieces that are less visible, are made with solid wood rather than veneered plywood with wood banding on the edges. This maintains coloring consistency throughout the piece, add strength, and is much easier to refinish without ruining in a hundred years. As well, our shelves are crafted from solid wood, using the same wood species of the piece.

Dovetailed Drawers

Dovetailed drawers resist lateral strain from use and give you the strongest joint possible. For added strength, we dovetail both the front and back of each drawer.

Center  Drawer  Glide

A center drawer glide achieves two things - a smooth glide and a square drawer. We use solid wood even for this invisible yet critically functional element of our furniture pieces.

Mortise and Tenon Base Frames

A tenon is a notched protrusion on the end of the horizontal piece of wood of a cabinet frame. A mortise is the socket on the vertical piece of a cabinet frame, which is sized to receive the tenon. At the Modern West Shop, we assemble all of our cabinet frames using glued mortise and tenon joints, giving your furniture the strength to withstand decades of use.

Back Rail on All Drawers

Most production furniture shops forego the back rail to save on material costs. However, we install both front and back rails to support our drawers. This improves durability and helps keep drawers square, making them reliable and easy to open for decades.

Glue Blocking

Each of our solid wood drawer bottoms are glued in place with glue blocks to increase drawer strength and keep them square no matter how many times they’re opened over the years.

Frame Splines

On our door frames, we cut each corner at a precise 45 degree angle and glued to create a perfectly square corner. To add strength and durability over time, and because we think it looks really nice, we add a spline to each corner. This detail is nearly impossible to find in production furniture, even the “nice” stuff, but we know this sets our pieces apart so you can pass it down to the next generation.

Finished by Hand

We finish our pieces by hand to highlight the richness and warmth of the wood and maintain the integrity of high-use surfaces for years to come. We use only the highest quality stains, natural oils, and topcoats to bring out every unique detail in our hand selected woods. To achieve the smoothest feel when touched, we lightly sand the wood in between several coats of sealer and topcoat finish. Once finished, each piece is marked with the Modern West brand to let future generations know it was proudly handmade in Colorado.