Louis Irion III
Fall 1993 Bucks County Town & Country Living
Southeast of Lancaster, in Christiana PA, is the Irion Company Furniture Makers. The business is situated in an old hardware store. Louis moved into his Christiana shop five years ago. Before that he had an antiques furniture restoration shop in Paoli, PA. There he still maintains a small shop and a showroom. In Paoli, Louis because experienced working with period antiques and obtained the knowledge necessary to begin making 18th century furniture. And it was in Paoli that he began to make his renown reproductions.
Learning to make fine 18th century furniture began with tracing designs, taking measurements, rubbings, and photographs of classic pieces. He visited museums and has acquired an extensive library which contains class books on fine, early furniture.
Louis Irion is a second generation furniture maker. He began his career working in his father’s shop, which is now in Berwyn, PA. Upon graduation from high school, he left furniture making to attend Millersville State Teachers College where he studied industrial arts. After his student teaching, he opted for building furniture rather than teaching.
“Wood,” Louis Irion proudly says, “is where we stake our reputation.” Louis has a deep feeling, almost a reverence for his wood. So, he cuts his own wood from logs. He said, “We have control over the cutting of each log. Cutting wood is like being a butcher, if you cut in the wrong places, it’s ruined. It still may be meat or wood, but the valuable cuts aren’t there. After each log is cut, it is marked and always stacked together. When we make a piece of furniture, we use the same log for all of the major components. It’s a little detail, but it shows. When we cut drawer fronts, we cut them from the same board so that the grain matches.”
Wood is so important to Louis, that he personally chooses each piece that his furniture makers use. He chooses from a selection of walnut, cherry, tiger maple, flame birch, and mahogany. And as the early Pennsylvania furniture makers did, he uses poplar as the secondary wood and for many of the painted pieces. “I select all of the wood for the piece. You can show someone how to cut a dovetail or how to plane a board, but you can’t teach how to select wood. Each piece has a special place in a piece of furniture.
Besides doing 18th century replicas, Irion also makes custom pieces and authentic reproductions of Shaker furniture. To maintain such a large facility and keep 16 furniture makers working, Irion Company has to turn out pieces. So, they make 80 to 100 tester bedsteads per year. Some men work only on these.
The shop has an 18th century feel. Each of Irion’s 16 furniture makers has his own workbench and hand tools. Each is skilled enough to do the fitting, cutting, sanding, and so on, right to the specified finish - Irion’s classic finish consists of hand rubbed shellac and wax. One of Louis’s skilled workers, Kendl Monn, has been with the company for seven years and like Irion, himself, Monn has been building furniture for 15 years. Monn, a valuable assistant, does most of the painting and special carving.
Irion, a stickler for authenticity, uses Ball and Ball hardware and is always on the lookout for tools proper to 18th century furniture building. He has the best power tools available, but their use is limited. They are only used for roughing out. He pointed out, “We do all of our dovetails, mortise and tenons, and carving by hand. When someone buys a piece of our furniture, they want to see hand tool marks and know that each joint is made and fitted by hand. There are no power tool marks left on a piece when we’re finish.”