Architectural Joiner and Cabinet Maker. Handmade and Handplaned Period Woodwork.

Since 1968, Caroline Sly has been designing and building authentically joined and finished period architectural woodwork. All work is designed to be in harmony with the eighteenth and nineteenth century buildings which she specializes in restoring. She uses period tools and techniques for period authenticity. Her production includes window sash, plank window frames, architectural joinery, hand planed mouldings and raised paneling, furniture and other historic recreations. Installation is available.

Our Specialties: Handmade Doors and Window Sash, Plank Window Frames, Authentic Architectural Joinery, Hand Planed Mouldings and Raised Paneling, Eighteenth Century Recreations, House Furniture and Cabinets, Cabinetmakers, Carpenters and Woodworkers.

Architectural Joiner and Cabinet Maker. Handmade Interiors.

Since 1968, Caroline Sly has been designing and building authentically joined and finished period architectural woodwork. All work is designed to be in harmony with the eighteenth and nineteenth century buildings which she specializes in restoring. She uses period tools and techniques for period authenticity. Installation is available.

Caroline Sly's handmade architectural woodwork has been featured in the following publications:

Early American Life Magazine, April 93, "Meeting an Original House"
Early American Life Magazine, August 94, "Thomas Jefferson's Skylights"
Early American Life Magazine, August 95, "An Everyman House"
Yankee Magazine, March 00, "Three Ways to Have an Old House"
This Old House Magazine, June 01, "Window Maker"
Swarthmore College Bulletin, March 97, "Apprenticed to Buildings"
Early American Life Directory of America's Best Craftsmen, 1994-2001, listed

HANDMADE INTERIORS
By Caroline Sly

I work alone in a small shop. My calling is to contribute architectural woodwork that is not only beautiful and well made but affordable and true to the house it is to go to. I encourage you to enter into the design phase of this work with me. In buildings and in furniture, the best pieces come of collaboration between owner and builder.

We respond to the beautiful rooms of the eighteenth century as harmonious compositions resonating with balance and liveliness. Designing rooms like those requires a sympathetic and experienced extension of that same harmony. Building them is best done with the skilful use of period tools.

I have been restoring eighteenth and nineteenth century houses since I moved to western Massachusetts in 1968, using hand tools of the period to recreate the old designs. The landscape is still full of old houses built by settlers from Cape Cod and the rest of coastal New England, similar to the early houses I knew growing up near Boston. Many of them have been damaged or altered over 200 years, and need informed restoration to recapture their original beauty.

Designing and building architectural woodwork for houses in other places has remained at the center of my shop's production. I travel to acquaint myself with the building in need, then return to my shop to design and build the pieces, and usually travel again to install. For some kinds of work I must stay on site, for a time, just as house-joiners have done in the past.

Mantelpieces and paneling are hand planed, carved by hand, and joined with mortise and tenon joints. Doors and window sash are through tenoned, and stiles and muntins are shaped with molding planes made for the purpose. Crown, bolection, and architrave moldings are also made with molding planes.

ABOUT WINDOWS

The windows of an old house are its eyes, and they express its soul as no other feature does. When the original windows and frames are still in place, they stand very far forward in the facade, especially if the frames are the plank frames typical of the 181 century. The glass appears to be right on the surface, because the glass recess is shallow and the putty looks very flat. The two halves of the double hung windows are nearly on the same plane because there thickness is only about an inch, not the one and three eighths inch of modern windows.

The old windows still with us today have endured two hundred years because they are made of quartersawn heartwood of white pine from big, slow growing trees. Such wood resists rot and weather damage and will hold up for years to come if kept painted. With modern weatherstripping built in and an interior storm window consonant with the style of the original architecture, your old house can be adequately weather tight.