The road to how Tahoe Slab Furniture started was a rough one, but it hasn’t kept people from ordering beautiful custom, live-edge wood furniture made from sustainably sourced timber of the Sierra Nevada and California’s Central Valley orchards.
Back in 2017, Tahoe Slab Furniture owner Colin Davis bought a house in Tahoe City and always had the idea to make his own furniture. As with many homes in North Lake Tahoe, there was a dead pine tree in his yard. He saw an opportunity to try to use the wood and give it a second life — but it didn’t quite work out as planned.
“People have a dream of what they want their home to look like and I enjoy making epic live-edge tables and doing the epoxy work. It’s fun to work with people on their designs.” –Colin Davis
“I had a pine tree in my yard that need to be taken down, but I didn’t want to waste the wood and felt like I needed to make it into something,” Davis says. “So, I bought a chainsaw mill and had plans in mind to make it into a table. However, then I found out I had to wait three years for the wood to season and dry out before I could do anything with it.”
With all these plans and anxious to get started on them, he decided not to wait and went to a local lumber yard to buy wood — but was faced with another hurdle.
“Buying locally sourced wood was expensive so to make it cost effective I got it in bulk,” he says. “With more wood I needed more equipment, so I got bigger tools and started making wood furniture out of my garage.”
Using his bulk wood and equipment, he started making furniture for himself, his friends and family and custom items for those who asked. But, when the neighbors started complaining about the noise, he realized he had to find a space to work outside of his home. In 2018, he found a place in Tahoe City to build his shop, but soon after the owner decided to tear down the building and replace it with a hotel.
Eventually, Davis found a space for his shop about an hour and a half away from the edge of Tahoe National Forest in North San Juan just outside of Nevada City. There a team of six craftsmen create heirloom-quality furniture pieces by way of milling, vacuum kiln drying, surfacing and finishing work. All Tahoe Slab Furniture wood is sourced between Reno, Nev., and the Central Valley; the company doesn’t use anything that doesn’t come from arborists or hasn’t naturally fallen.
Since opening the workshop in North San Juan, Tahoe Slab Furniture also found neighbor and blacksmith Eric Clausen, who forges his own metalwork. Now retired, he makes knives from old bandsaw blades and handles sourced through Tahoe Slab Furniture and sold through its website.
The heirloom furniture company has also partnered with Greywood Design owner and Incline Village, Nev., native Tom Loeschner for custom milling services.
“Tom has been doing this for a long time and we’ve bought a lot of wood from him. We found him on Facebook and learned a lot about how to make tables using extraordinary wood from urban environments,” he says.
Now two years later, Davis says that his favorite part of running Tahoe Slab Furniture is realizing people’s visions.
“People have a dream of what they want their home to look like and I enjoy making epic live-edge tables and doing the epoxy work. It’s fun to work with people on their designs,” he says. “I love doing epoxy work and the river tables, taking all these different types of wood that would otherwise be discarded and aren’t even burnable and making them into something extraordinary.”
One of his most recent and breathtaking pieces of work is a coffee table made of English walnut burl wood with added blue to make it resemble Lake Tahoe. The wood grain and swirling colors make it look almost hypnotic.
“We put about 80 hours into the average table,” Davis says. “In our two years of doing this we never built a single thing that we planned on selling. Most of what we make are custom builds. I love that you can make an heirloom quality piece of work that people appreciate out of something that would otherwise be thrown away.”
Tahoe Slab Furniture has a retail shop in Tahoe City that’s open by appointment only. | tahoeslab.com
