Company

Modern West Furniture Company is a small, woman-owned custom furniture shop based in Silver Cliff, Colorado. With a view of the inspiring Sangre de Cristo mountain range, our designs are driven by nature - function, simplicity, and quality. With the use of traditional joinery, natural finishes, and an obsession with detail, our products stand the test of time. 

Founder

Kim Stone knew how to assemble wood before she could read and write. When her young father built his own woodshop to escape the stresses of life as a police officer and raising five kids, she became his shadow in the shop. To keep her out of his hair, he taught her how to use simple hand tools - a hammer, a handsaw, a sanding block - to build birdhouses with scrap wood. Forty years later, remarkably, many remain scattered about her parents' Brownsville, Oregon property, a warm home to nurture new life.

Her love for the craft only grew with time. While her friends cruised the mall giggling about their latest crush, Kim binge-watched Norm Abrams' The New Yankee Workshop and taught herself to build small tables, nightstands, keepsake boxes, and more. When she was 14, she even built a treehouse for her kid brother in the old walnut tree behind her childhood home.

By the time college rolled around, Kim knew how to draw up furniture plans,  make dovetail joinery, and build just about anything she set her mind to. She continued honing her skills for elective credits in her college campus woodshop while a pre-nursing major (much more practical, she told herself). By her early 20s, her interest in medicine had waned and the call to woodworking only grew. Love and sunshine had called her to Colorado, and upon her arrival she joined a fledgling art cooperative called The Other Side Arts. In her freezing cold studio in a once-abandoned warehouse, she built furniture with found materials and salvaged wood, selling numerous pieces through the co-ops gallery. She then apprenticed with Stephen Anthony in his Denver-based Ravenwood Studios, learning to build high-end antique reproductions for wealthy clientele.

As Kim approached her 30s, life and the need for steady pay and health insurance slowly led her away from building furniture and into corporate for a number of years. She maintained a small woodshop during this time - even in a friends' garage across town for a time - dreaming of one day opening a custom furniture business.

In 2015, armed with business and marketing skills, a few life lessons, and many more gray hairs, Kim decided to make a run at designing and building custom furniture once again. She slowly acquired a fully-functional shop's worth of tools and equipment and wrote a business plan. In 2021, she met the love of her life and together they decided to leave city life behind, moving to a small town in the mountains. Here Kim could finally fully realize her dream, and in 2022 opened Modern West Furniture Company.

When Kim not building furniture, I enjoy...