The Making of a Penwood Piece: Meet the Artisans Behind Your Furniture

Every custom piece that leaves one of our four showrooms passes through the hands of a master builder before it reaches yours. Not a machine on a line. A person, usually working from a small shop or a family farm somewhere in Southern Ontario, who's been building furniture the same way for years.

Penwood has been a family-run business since 1993. In more than 30 years, the one thing that hasn't changed is who actually builds the furniture: more than 20 Mennonite craftsmen we work with directly, not a subcontracted factory we've never visited.

It starts with the wood, not the design

Before a single cut is made, the wood itself gets chosen and kiln-dried. We work in solid hardwoods only: Red Oak, White Oak, Cherry, Walnut, Ash, Pine, and a few grades of Maple depending on the piece. Kiln-drying takes the moisture content down to a stable level so the wood won't warp or crack once it's in your home, through a Canadian winter and a humid summer alike.

This step is also where "Modern Mennonite" starts to mean something specific. It's not a style. It's a sourcing decision: real solid hardwood, from local suppliers, given the time it needs before anyone picks up a tool.

Kiln-drying itself takes time most buyers never think about. Freshly cut lumber holds a lot of moisture, and wood that gets built into furniture before it's properly dried will shrink, crack, or warp later as it loses that moisture inside your home. A kiln brings the wood down to a stable moisture content in a controlled environment, so the table or dresser you order doesn't keep changing shape after it's already in your dining room. Skipping or rushing this step is one of the quiet ways cheaper furniture cuts corners that don't show up until months later.

A tradition older than the business

Penwood didn't invent the building techniques our artisans use. Mennonite communities across Southern Ontario have built furniture by hand for generations, long before "Modern Mennonite" was a phrase on a website. What Penwood does is connect that existing network of builders, more than 20 of them, with customers who want the furniture but don't have a direct relationship with a builder themselves.

That distinction matters. We're not a factory that hired some craftsmen. We're a family-run business, started in 1993, that exists to make this kind of furniture accessible without watering down how it's actually built.

Then it goes to the builder

Once the wood is ready, it goes to one of the artisans in our network. These are the people who actually decide how a joint gets cut, how a drawer gets fitted, and how much sanding a tabletop needs before it's ready for stain. This is where the "handcrafted" claim on our website stops being a marketing word and starts being a literal description of what happened to your furniture before it arrived.

Joinery is where solid wood furniture earns its durability. Mortise-and-tenon joints, dovetailed drawers, and doweled connections all rely on precise, hand-checked fits, not a machine cutting the same automated pattern into every piece regardless of how that particular board of wood happens to be grained. A builder working by hand can feel when a joint is tight and adjust before it's assembled. A production line can't.

We've watched this process enough times to know it's not fast, and it's not supposed to be. A custom piece typically takes 6 to 12 weeks from order to delivery, because it's built after you order it, not pulled from a warehouse shelf. That timeline covers the wood selection, the build itself, and the finishing, with room built in for a piece that needs an extra day of sanding to actually get it.

Finish is a hand process too

Once a piece is built, it gets stained and finished by hand, not sprayed on a conveyor line. Different wood species take stain differently, which is part of why we photograph every stain option on the actual species it's meant for rather than one generic wood sample. A stain that looks warm on Cherry can look completely different on Maple.

This is also the stage where flaws would normally get caught and corrected, because a person is looking at the piece directly, not a camera on an assembly line.

The sustainability side of hand-built furniture

The same artisan network that builds each piece by hand is also why Penwood can commit to a 2-to-1 reforestation ratio and near-total utilization of the wood we source. Working with smaller, local builders instead of a mass-production facility means less waste at every step, from the mill to the finished piece in your home. Choosing Penwood supports the sustainability of the rural communities these builders work in, a direct line most furniture buyers never get to see.

Mass production hides that line on purpose. A factory sourcing lumber for thousands of identical pieces a week has no real relationship with where that wood came from. Our builders do, because they're often working with the same local suppliers year after year, and waste that would get discarded on a factory floor gets used instead.

What quality control actually looks like

Because a person builds and finishes each piece rather than a machine repeating the same pass, quality control happens throughout the process instead of at one inspection point at the end of a line. A builder who notices a tighter grain pattern on one board can decide to use it somewhere the wood will show more, or set aside a board with a flaw before it becomes a tabletop instead of catching it after the piece is assembled.

That doesn't mean every piece is flawless. Wood is a natural material, and grain, colour, and figure vary from board to board even within the same species. What it means is that decisions about wood placement and finish get made by someone looking directly at the actual material, not by a spec sheet applied uniformly to every unit off a production run.

What you can actually see

If you visit one of our showrooms in Oakville, Ancaster, Morriston, or Collingwood, you're looking at the same kind of piece a builder in that network made for someone else's custom order, on display so you can see the joinery and the finish up close before you order your own. Every showroom carries pieces built by the artisans we work with regularly, so what you're touching in the store reflects what you'd get if you ordered a custom piece in a different wood or size.

Preserving that tradition while building for how people actually live today is the whole idea behind Modern Mennonite furniture. It's not furniture styled to look handmade. It is handmade, by people we work with directly, using wood sourced and dried the same way it has been for decades.

Want to see the process start to finish for your own piece? Learn more about who we are or start a custom order at any of our four showrooms.

What this means if you're ordering your first custom piece

If you've never ordered furniture this way before, the process can feel less familiar than picking something off a shelf and taking it home the same day. That's fair. Here's what actually changes on your end: you pick the wood species and stain in person, against real samples rather than a screen, you get a realistic build timeline instead of a vague estimate, and the piece that arrives is the one you actually chose, not the closest thing a warehouse happened to have in stock.

It also means asking questions is normal, not an inconvenience. Our staff at each showroom can walk you through which species holds up best for a high-traffic dining table versus a piece that sees lighter use, and which stains show wear differently over time. That conversation is part of what you're paying for when you choose a custom piece over something mass-produced.

Built to last for generations, starting with the person who built it

We put "built to last for generations" on our website because it describes the wood, not because it sounds good in a headline. A piece that's kiln-dried properly, joined by hand, and finished with care doesn't have a natural expiry date the way particleboard furniture does. The generations part isn't hypothetical. It's the actual, physical result of the process described above, done the same way for more than 30 years by the same network of local builders.

The next time you sit down at a solid wood table, or open a drawer that still slides smoothly after years of use, that's this process, not a coincidence.