By Alicia Stemper/Vitamin O
Beyond trying to be easy to find on Google and Facebook, Hill Country Woodworks owner/operators Mark Todd, Will Bucher, and Dave Pearson don’t worry too much about advertising. “We’re not trying to be popular…we’re just focused on being good.” Their custom furniture business sits in an old gas station on Old Greensboro Highway, a road Todd thinks is the prettiest one in the county. According to Pearson, Hill Country isn’t a dramatic place. “It is stable and for the most part, predictable,” he said. “We are able to really focus on making the best quality furniture we possibly can and providing a good experience for our clients… Word of mouth and reputation matter a lot to us.”
Pearson believes furniture making is more of a craft than an art, because art “implies too much subjective expression.” There is a foundational knowledge necessary for a furniture maker to “get to the point where you can do what you want with it.” While teaching furniture design at Appalachian State, Pearson noticed “Students would have great ideas – if only it weren’t for gravity.” Combined, he and his partners have over 40 years of experience. “It’s not just being able to make something that looks and feels nice…you have to take into consideration how wood is going to move over the span of several decades. That’s what really separates our work from people who just don’t have that sort of institutional knowledge.” At Hill Country, each piece is made start to finish by the same person and it is branded, dated, and signed. “We are not going to put our name on something that will look good for one to three years and then start falling apart.”
Hill Country makes heirloom quality furniture, and stylistically, “we swim in the modern and contemporary pools.” Bucher likes making big dining tables, Todd does many of the really custom pieces, and Pearson is drawn to chairs and small tables. Hill Country occasionally sells a piece off their small showroom floor, but they don’t really worry about maintaining an inventory. They are “a little bit of an odd duck” during the fall Orange County Artist Guild Tour because people “tend not to buy a dining table on a whim.” Notes Todd, “I love the whole process. I like looking back at the end of the day and seeing what I’ve done.”