For anyone interested in American furniture — the tools, the people, the history.
You've found yourself here. Stay.
The knowledge in this craft lives in scattered people, and not enough of it gets written down. SAPFM gathers both — at chapter meetings, at the annual conference, on the pages of the journal and the magazine — so the work sharpens with practice and the record of how American furniture is made, and was made, thickens behind us.
By Dennis Zongker (Nebraska). Macassar Ebony with American Holly inlay — the cabinet that made the editor catch his breath.
Inspired by Émile-Jacques Ruhlmann, the French cabinetmaker who carried Art Deco's most rigorous version into the late 1930s. Zongker's piece pulls the same vocabulary into a working maker's shop — segmented Macassar Ebony, American Holly diamond inlay across the doors, twenty-four interior drawers in soft curly maple.
The 2026 Annual Conference returns to Colonial Williamsburg the week of October [dates]. Bench demonstrations, member presentations, a tour of the Anthony Hay cabinet shop with Kaare Loftheim, the Cartouche Award presentation, and the long evenings between sessions where most of the actual work happens.
Two makers — Steve Lash and Mickey Callahan — sat at the same table at the Working Wood in the 18th Century conference in Williamsburg, January 1999. By the end of the year, SAPFM was incorporated. Twenty-five years on: twenty-two chapters, two journals, a national conference each summer, and the quiet network underneath it all.