2014 Wood Diamond Award

Main Category: Kitchen
Sub Category: European
Dollar Amount: Over $25,000

Briefly describe your business and the type of products manufactured.
Rivendell Woodworks, Inc. is a custom cabinet and millwork manufacturer, specializing in high-end residential (and occasional commercial) cabinetry. We follow through with design, computer layouts, construction and installation of our work to ensure the highest quality end product for the discerning client.

​What materials/species were used in this project/item?
All exteriors, including doors, drawer fronts and end panels, as well as undersides of upper cabinets, scribe fillers and toekick skins, are slab rift-cut walnut veneered over NAUF-MDF with grain-match across adjacent panels wherever possible. All interiors are Columbia PureBond clear acrylic finished maple plywood.We install various cabinet inserts provided by Rev-a-Shelf to include, spice pull out, waste & recycling bins, dog food pull out bin, adjustable drawer peg divider systems. We use General Finishes wood stains and Enduro water based Polyurethane top coats. All stains are hand applies, top coats are sprayed using HVLP equipment.

Describe, in detail, the project/item’s construction.
The big challenge presented was that this U-shaped kitchen did not have clean 90-degree corners, but was a parallelogram, with one acute inside corner and one oblique inside corner. That, plus the very precise clearances needed by the window casings that one can see in the photographs, made for very involved and time-consuming work on the initial computer layouts. Cutouts on the CNC and subsequent assembly and installation as a result had to be, and were, very precise and exacting.

What is the most unusual aspect or outstanding characteristic of this entry?
The client was seeking a very modern, sleek look, with horizontal-grain rift walnut veneers, tight clearances and clean, crisp corners. The cabinetry hugged the non-standard angles of the house with oblique and acute inside angles.

List any items that were outsourced (not produced by you or your shop).
Clear conversion varnish finish and finished countertops were by others. We refined the preliminary rough architect plans into working computer layouts, cut out and built all casework carcases, doors and drawer fronts, as well as installed all of our work.

Please offer a brief explanation of how being a member of the CMA has benefited you and/or your business. 
As a new member of CMA, we are excited by all the various benefits offered.
The opportunity to meet with and share experiences and insights with other members, at occasional regional meetings as well as at the annual fairs, plus through the member forums and webinars, is extremely valuable. We are all a collection of like-minded professionals keyed on the mutual goal of becoming better woodworkers and successful businesspeople.