Every Friday, Conall Haldane leaves his Ancramdale dairy barn, gets into a panel van, and heads to Hudson to the fancy antique stores that line Warren Street, picking up furniture that has been rained on, chopped up, splintered, or otherwise abused. Some time later, he makes the trip again, delivering to a grateful owner a shimmering gem of carefully restored furniture.
He has been at it for 23 years, steadily accumulating knowledge in the rigorous and unforgiving craft of antique furniture restoration.
Rescuing old furniture is a lifelong calling for Haldane and his partner at Tri State Antique Restoration, Mike DeRocha. Their shop, located on a working farm on Wiltsie Bridge Road, functions as a sort of intensive care ward for great furniture, a place to work quietly, with deep respect for the wood and the intentions of the craftsman who made each piece generations ago.
How Haldane came to the craft is a story older than this country. It’s a story of mentors and apprentices who slowly learn their trade. Similar craft guilds were a staple throughout Europe as far back as the Middle Ages.
Haldane was born in Donegal, in a rugged part of Northwest Ireland, and moved with his family to Columbia County when he was 6. His father plays the whistle and the accordion and had similar plans for his children. “When I was 6, I was made to play the violin,” Haldane recalled. “I hated it. Music was not to be my future.”
He began in the trade as a delivery man for John Taylor, an Englishman who owned Tri State in the 1990s, back when it was called Crown Antiques. Taylor ran a tight ship. Shortly after starting, Haldane realized the shop hours were 5 a.m. to 1:30 p.m. “For a 22 year old guy, that was kind of tough,” he said. “But I got used to it.
“Little by little, John started trusting me and showing me things.”
Haldane spent 15 years as an apprentice to Taylor, who had himself studied under a master craftsman in England. “I learned his way,” Haldane said, showing a visitor a dusty scrapbook that details spectacular jobs executed over the decades.
So what exactly did Taylor teach him?
“John told me something that stuck with me: Don’t be afraid to make a mistake. He would always say to me, ‘A bloke who doesn’t make a f-up, doesn’t make anything.’” After Taylor died, Haldane eventually inherited] the business.
“It started out as just a job. Now 23 years later, I’m still at it,” he said with a quiet smile. “I get satisfaction out of it.”
Stepping into the cavernous barn is like stepping back in time. A faded heraldic map of the Kings and Queens of England greets you at the entrance, along with an electric saw. Century-old woodworking tools line the walls.
A quiet man, Haldane lets his work do the talking. He maintains no social media and has no website. But people who own fine furniture, or just furniture they are seriously attached to, know where to find him. Antique dealers in Millerton, Hudson, Millbrook, and surrounding towns say his name with awe.”Those guys just do wonderful work,” said Laurie Higgins at Old Mill Antiques of Irondale.
About 90% of Tri State’s jobs come from antique stores. While bigger dealers have in-house restorers, “the dealers come to us when they have a real problem,” said Haldane.
Creating a missing drawer, repairing 100-year old hardware, gluing hairline strips of inlaid wood is all in a day’s work. “Actually, a lot of our projects are repairing other people’s screwups,” said Haldane.
Haldane and DeRocha take particular pleasure in working with rare old wood such as Brazilian rosewood and old growth mahogany, now illegal to harvest due to its scarcity. “We get a lot of fancy woods here in the old furniture,” Haldane said. “It’s a treat to bring them back to life.” Lately, many commissions involve the current hot item — mid-century furniture, a trend that started with the “Mad Men” TV series.
There’s just one thing that scares the two craftsmen: “IKEA furniture,” said DeRocha. “I’d rather assemble a gas grill than a piece of IKEA furniture. The stuff drives me nuts. We’d rather restore something than buy it new.”
Along the way, they’ve had their share of near disasters. “We had a console with zebrawood that just disintegrated as soon as we touched it,” said Haldane. “The worst part was when I had to call the client and tell him what had happened. I was pretty nervous.” Fortunately they were able to rebuild the wreck, and, Haldane said, “the client was happy in the end.”
Another challenge is what Haldane calls “the boat anchors” — hulking, insanely heavy Victorian-era commodes. “Some guy brings in something that was his grandmother’s and he says to me, ‘Save it.’ And we can barely move the thing. It’s a boat anchor.”
Rarely do they turn down a project. “You never know what will come in,” said Haldane, who, on his day off, enjoys helping his brothers restore an old house. “It pleases me to turn junk into something beautiful, and bring it back to the way it was 50 or 150 years ago.”
Their devotion to the craft does not translate into sentimentality: “That inlaid console we worked on has wood that looks just like a pizza,” said DeRocha. “But we fixed it.”
And so the backcountry guild in Ancramdale endures, breathing new life into beautiful things the way it’s been done for centuries, no matter what goes on in the outside world. Said DeRocha, “We’d love to show someone younger how to do this.”
Just wonderful to know that craftspeople like this still exist!