Meg Roussos / The BulletinJeremy Graham, co-owner of Black Canyon Woodworks, right, and lead artisan Nate Hardenbrook inside the workshop in Bend.

Jeremy Graham named the business he and his wife opened three years ago, Black Canyon Woodworks, after a wilderness area in the Ochoco Mountains.

“It’s one of my favorite places in the world,” he said.

Before that, the soft-spoken Roseburg native made furniture in the two-car garage at the family’s former home on 18th Street in Bend, he said, before demand dictated a move to 4,000 square feet of workshop and office space on Layton Avenue.

Woodworking “has always been a passion of mine,” as much art as craft, he said. The designs he invokes are inspired by well-known craftspeople such as the late woodworker Sam Maloof, whose pieces are displayed in major museums. “I like a piece of furniture to feel like a piece of wood and not a plastic-coated piece of wood,” Jeremy Graham said.

For a time, Graham, who earned a degree at Oregon State University in civil engineering, worked on designing and building wastewater-treatment plants in the Willamette Valley and in West Virginia. Lisa Graham, also an OSU graduate, with a degree in chemical engineering, is the marketing force behind the operation and her husband’s inspiration, he said.

“I love making furniture,” Jeremy Graham said. “What I love more than anything, I like making furniture for my wife, I guess, because it makes her really happy.”

Business strategy at Black Canyon Woodworks has three fronts: one-off pieces of custom furniture, handmade pieces of art; interior finish work as subcontractor on building sites,which is work Graham said he hopes to expand; and cutting boards, about 90 percent of which are bought by real estate brokers around the country as closing gifts for their clients.

If the high-end furniture turned out by Jeremy Graham and lead artisan Nate Hardenbrook, fashioned from mostly cherry and walnut, represent the soul of Black Canyon Woodworks, the cutting board side is the muscle. Graham said the business of making and selling cutting boards, about 250 a month, provides a reliable income for the company and steady work for its employees.

“We’re trying to build something that is relatively sustainable, and I think in order to do that it needs to be somewhat recession-proof,” he said. “Our diversification will help us with that.”

Black Canyon clients typically allow the company artistic leeway to create furniture that meets a particular setting, he said. But the furniture side of the house is filling a tough and selective niche, Jeremy Graham said.

He contemplates one day creating distinctive lines of furniture the company artisans can reproduce, with stock on hand to showcase and sell.

“I like to build things that somebody can look at it and say, ‘I know that didn’t come from Ikea,’” he said.

— Reporter: 541-617-7815,

jditzler@bendbulletin.com

Q: What do you envision Black Canyon Woodworks will look like in five years?

A: Jeremy Graham: What I envision in five years is having our own building with separate areas where we manufacture furniture and cutting boards, and I would like to have a nice-sized showroom for furniture and cutting boards. I would like to have multiple finish crews doing all-custom interiors, and doing some high-end tenant improvement projects, as well.

Q: Where do you get the wood to create cutting boards and furniture?

A: Jeremy Graham : For the cutting boards, we get most of our wood from hardwood suppliers, and a majority of it comes from Hardwood Industries here in Bend. … Almost all of our wood for furniture comes from small mills in the valley, where they’re getting their wood from blown-down trees or trees removed from construction. Over 90 percent of the wood for our furniture comes from those sources.