Knock on Wood

What a great surprise!

The other day, one of the ladies that works upstairs brought me a present – a mini-Adirondack chair!  Boy was I excited!  As a mouse, I am used to living simple, but this gift made me rethink the design of my little home in the Amana Coffee & Tea room.  To get the creative juices pumping, I decided to visit a shop with the most beautiful furniture on the planet – the Amana Furniture & Clock Shop.

The Amana Furniture & Clock Shop makes
beautiful dining room tables, gorgeous beds and
elegant desks, like this one.

The tradition of the Amana Furniture & Clock Shop goes back to the 1850s when craftsmen in the Amanas built furniture just for members of the community.  Great attention to detail was used to build each piece of furniture so it could be handed down in families from one generation to the next.  The same level of top-quality craftsmanship remains today.

Before it was the Amana Furniture
& Clock Shop, this building was
part of the calico mill complex.

The present location of the Amana Furniture & Clock Shop was originally the Amana Calico Mill.  Built in the 1860s, the calico mill helped create one of America’s favorite patterned fabrics.  Following WWI however, the dyes needed to make calico fabric were no longer available from Germany and the mill was replaced with a cabinet shop in 1917.

The furniture shop also
sells Cuckoo Clocks made
in Germany!

In 1932, there were three cabinet shops in the Amana Colonies.  After the Great Change, the Amana cabinet shop was chosen to become the main site for all future cabinetmaking.  All of the best equipment and craftsmen were brought to the Amana location.

Today, the Amana Furniture & Clock Shop designs and builds many different types of furniture.  From a traditional Amana rocking chair to a beautiful roll-top desk, you can find every piece of furniture imaginable. In addition to their furniture, they also build and sell beautiful clocks, ranging in size and wood type.  They even sell cuckoo clocks – if y my hole were a little bigger….

As I scurried around the clock shop, I saw a door was cracked open.  Being the curious mouse that I am, I decided to go in and see what was on the other side.

At one of the workbenches where the craftsmen
build the furniture.

There were piles on piles of wood.  There were saws of every shape and size. And there were tons of tools.  I had found the furniture shop’s workshop!

As I looked around, I found that the furniture shop uses three types of wood: oak, cherry and walnut.  Walnut is the traditional wood of the Amana Colonies and was used almost exclusively in communal times.  Although only 1% of hardwood furniture in the U.S. is walnut, the Amana Furniture Shop uses walnut for almost 60% of their business.

After I finished my tour of the workshop and looked around at all of the furniture one last time, I decided I would have to come back in the future to truly make my mouse house into a home.