Ellington

Last winter, filmmaker and musician Matthew Magee met up with his roommate from college, Wes Bonner, to build a coffee t8able using an old window that Magee had found. After converting the frame into a base and adding a layer of turquoise paint, the two finished the piece by attaching a set of finished barn rafters to stand as the table's legs.

A year later, the two remember the project as the genesis for the company they formed in March 2006, which they christened Nold Furniture.

"It turned out cool," Magee recalls. "So I said, let's try to build furniture."

Bonner and Magee continue to operate on the premise of their first piece. The term "Nold" is a combination of the words "new" and "old," and indicates that each table, frame or cabinet that they make is made of new and old materials. Mostly, they use antique wood found on road trips they take throughout the state. Sometimes, friends clue them in to a particularly promising find.

Bonner says extracting old wood from abandoned homes has been relatively easy. They are particularly attracted to "wood with a story." Much of what they have built uses wood collected from sites like cattle chutes or antebellum homes.

"People have walked on these floors for years and years," Magee says, referring to a table whose panels were uprooted from a home in Vicksburg built before the Civil War. "It's cool to me to have wood that has a story behind it."

They aren't confined to just using wood, though. To achieve an edgier affect, they have worked with an iron-work specialist to accent a table made of a door. Jagged and thick shapes, like octagons, also offset the work.

One of their signatures is the use of a vibrant mix of complementary colors: burgundy stripes next to sky blue, pale yellow and brown stripes. To complete the "modern rustic look" they strive for, the paint is distressed by sanding and staining after it is applied.

The process of construction, they say, is spontaneous, which may be a reflection of the mixed experience that Bonner and Magee brought to the endeavor at its outset. Magee had worked with visual arts through film, both in school and in his work recording depositions for lawyers. Bonner had garnered more technical experience, as he worked construction. Before that, he jokes, he didn't know how to read a tape measure.

"There are definitely no rules with design for us," Bonner explains. "Being creative—we feed on that."

Though their company is still in its infancy, Bonner and Magee have made significant strides in the past year by opening their own workshop in an old furniture warehouse off State Street, and they now sell directly to furniture stores like Coyote Wild. They have created a Web site (noldfurniture.com), and they have sold a few custom-made pieces to buyers who heard about their work through word-of-mouth.

But their New Year's resolutions include expanding their base and opening up their sales to a wider demographic. Right now, Bonner says, their job is only part time. They usually spend much of the day at the shop on Tuesdays and Thursdays, but both still work outside jobs: Bonner as the interim pastor at First Baptist Church in Lexington, and Magee as a filmmaker. They hope to work at their company full time eventually, whether by making custom-made pieces for individual buyers or by working with designers to produce pieces for homes.

More importantly, they hope to sustain what they feel is worthy work. Magee fondly describes themselves as "good stewards of old stuff."

"It's definitely exciting to take old wood and make something of it," Bonner adds. "It's something you're not going to get anywhere else."