Why Choose Countryside Amish Furniture

Why Countryside Amish Furniture

Mel Stutzman spent years sanding, finishing, and running Amish furniture shops before he ever owned his own company. It is this lived experience that helps set Countryside Amish Furniture apart, because it gave him both the personal connections and the professional know-how to partner with only the best Amish workshops in the country. Having walked the walk as a furniture maker himself, he insists on the best timber and varnishes available, and on a pace that leaves no detail rushed.

That standard carries all the way through, which is why the furniture is built the way it is and why the person who answers your call can talk about joinery.

Quick Facts About Countryside Amish Furniture

Our owner came up through the shops

Mel was raised Amish, and his formal schooling ended after eighth grade. He went to work in a furniture shop instead, sanding wood.

Sanding is the bottom of the ladder and the best place to learn. You are the one who has to fix a surface somebody rushed, so you find out quickly what a good one feels like under your palm. Mel moved into the finish room, then up to shop foreman, and eventually into custom Amish-style cabinetry.

By the time he bought Countryside in 2010, he had spent more than 25 years in furniture and cabinetry. He still lives and works in Arthur, Illinois, among the community he was raised in. To learn more about Mel, read his interview with Bold Journey or watch his conversation on Beyond the Design.

How Mel chooses an Amish workshop

When Mel walks into a shop, he checks the parts nobody is supposed to see, like the back of a drawer or the inside of a cabinet. He asks what species the drawer boxes are.

What he requires:

• Solid hardwood where it counts. Tops, frames, legs, and drawer boxes have to be solid wood. Veneer laid over particleboard cannot be repaired once it fails.
• Named joinery, cut properly. Frames and rails are joined with mortise and tenon, drawers with dovetails, panels and case backs with tongue and groove. Solid wood expands and contracts with the seasons, and glue and fasteners alone eventually give out under that movement. A cut joint locks the wood itself in place and holds.
• Hand sanding before the finish room. Every surface gets worked by hand after it comes off the machines. A finish will only ever look as good as the surface underneath it.
• Room to modify. The shop has to be able to change dimensions, add storage, or swap hardware on a given piece, which is what building to order requires.

Fifty-plus family workshops in Pennsylvania, Indiana, and Ohio clear that bar, and most of them run only a handful of woodworkers.

How your Amish furniture is built

Your table starts well before anyone touches a saw, with someone choosing boards and matching them for grain and color so the top reads as one surface instead of a row of mismatched planks.

The frame then goes together with mortise and tenon joints, which resist the sideways force that eventually turns a table base wobbly. Drawers are dovetailed for much the same reason: interlocking joints resist being pulled apart, and that is exactly what a loaded drawer does to its front every time you open it. Those drawers ride on full-extension, soft-close slides, so you can reach all the way to the back and the drawer will not bang shut behind you.

Once the piece is built and hand sanded, it gets a catalyzed conversion varnish in multiple coats. A catalyst cures that finish chemically rather than letting it air dry, and the result shrugs off water rings, household cleaners, spilled wine, and the daily scrape of plates and homework. Read what makes it the toughest finish we use.

The solid hardwood underneath all of that means your grandchildren can sand this piece down and refinish it decades from now.

What you can customize

Almost everything about a piece can change, because nothing here exists until you order it. You choose the wood species, the size, the stain, the hardware, and the upholstery. You can add soft-close slides, touch lighting, keyboard trays, wire grommets, or extra drawers and shelves, and on many pieces we can go further still, into a different base style or an added cabinet section.

If what you want is not on a dropdown menu, ask anyway. Customers send us photos and magazine tear sheets all the time and ask whether one of our shops can build something close in solid wood. Often the answer is yes, and when it is not, we say so.

Talk to our design team or call 888-297-4555.

Lead time, payment, and delivery

About 14 to 18 weeks. On the day you order, your table does not exist yet, so that window has to cover board selection, building, hand sanding, and a multi-coat finish that needs to cure between passes. We put the number in front of you early so you can plan around it. More on lead times.

You pay in two parts. Half goes in when your order reaches the shop, and the rest comes due once finishing is complete. Nothing is owed in full months before your furniture arrives.

Flat $150 delivery, inside and set up. One rate covers the whole order, anywhere in the contiguous 48 states. Our crew carries the furniture in, puts it where you point, and sets it up. There is no per-item freight and no separate charge for placement.

We confirm every detail before a shop starts. Someone on our team walks through your specifications with you line by line. A made-to-order table cannot be quietly exchanged if a measurement was wrong, and we would much rather catch it in a phone call.

Free wood and stain samples

We will mail you free wood, stain, fabric, and leather samples, and we would rather you used them. Hold them against your floors and your existing furniture, in your own light. A screen cannot show you how cherry will look in your dining room, and this is the one part of the decision you can test before you commit to it.

Request free samples

Who you are talking to when you reach out to us

Our team works in Arthur, Illinois, in the same town as our owner and near many of the shops we buy from, and we have worked together for decades. So when you use our chat or call 888-297-4555, you will reach Bailiegh Basham, our head of sales and marketing, Rosie Ebel, our pricing analyst, or Mel Stutzman, the owner himself.

What happens if your furniture is damaged in transit

Our delivery crews are chosen for their experience, and every piece gets blanket-wrapped before it goes on the truck. That same crew carries your furniture inside and sets it up, which makes them the last trained eyes on it, and they look it over in your home before they leave. If there is any damage at all, the piece goes back with them.

What Countryside Amishj Furniture customers say