PRAIRIE BARNWOOD
RECLAIMING HISTORY Every piece tells a story at Prairie Barnwood
BY LINDSEY WARD
When you’re driving down the highway and see an abandoned barn, you probably think that rickety old building’s best years are behind it. But Blayne Wyton believes every barn has a story to tell. The founder of Morden- based reclaimed furniture company Prairie Barnwood sees beyond the worn boards, the rusty nails and the manure stains. He sees the makings of a sturdy dining room table, a regal fireplace mantle, a bench for the back deck. He sees a moment of history transformed into a beloved family heirloom. And that’s why, one day, Wyton decided to tear down a barn. “In 2008, I was building custom kitchens here in Morden and the market was a little bit hard,” he says. “I took a vacation to Southern Ontario. We were driving through Wisconsin and Illinois, and it’s kind of weird but it kind of just popped into my head: ‘You should rip down a barn.’ ” Once he returned home, he located a 19th- century barn in Rosengart, just south of Winkler, and dismantled it with the sole employee of his then-company Windsor Furniture. As they were taking it down – board by board, nail by nail – his co-worker asked, “What do we keep?” Wyton responded: “I don’t have a clue.” Wyton, who grew up in “the oil rig world” in Edmonton, had an uncle who had torn down a barn in Alberta and made hardwood floors out of it, so he was thinking of something along those lines, but really wasn’t sure what he was going to do with the truckload of wood until he got home. There he used his knowledge of antiques, and his love for
100-year-old Morris-style furniture, to build a hall table one night, and a dining table the next. “My landlord said, ‘Boy, you need to start selling this.’ So I got online and started trying to push it,” Wyton says. “It took three or four years, but it really took off.” That’s for sure. What Wyton didn’t know when he launched Prairie Barnwood later in 2008 was that he was on the cutting edge of the reclaimed wood furniture and home decor trend. He was literally nailing the rustic look a full five years before Fixer Uppers Chip and Joanna Gaines even hit the HGTV airwaves. “I was just at the right place at the right time listening to the right voice,” he laughs. However, Wyton notes that with so many businesses wanting a piece of the trend, people are finding shortcuts to come up with rustic-looking wood, while Prairie Barnwood builds every piece of furniture with original wood – and he can tell you what region it came from, and the story behind the barn it was built from. “I think at one point people would take a picture of food and put it on Instagram and everyone was excited, but now you’ve got to show how you’ve grown it and how you’ve cut it and harvested it, and how you’ve prepared it,” he says. “I think this furniture is similar to that in that there’s such a story behind it that when it’s in your home it’s not just, ‘Here’s my table.’ It’s ‘Hey, check out my table that’s actually a support beam out of a barn from the turn of the century.’ ” Plus, there’s the quality factor. “It’s so solid,” says Wyton. “Because I refinished furniture, that’s how I learned to build furniture. That’s the way we build it, just the way it was made 100 years ago. It’s sturdy.” And chic. Wyton and his wife, Tara, design a lot of the furniture, but clients often request unique custom pieces. Memorable
orders include a dining room table for a member of the New Jersey Devils, hardwood floors for a ritzy home in the Hamptons and the interior of the tundra vehicles used by northern Manitoba polar bear tour company Churchill Wild. The bulk of Prairie Barnwood’s business is in Western Canada and the Maritimes, but Wyton has his sights set on North Shore Chicago as well as California’s Napa Valley. They’ve got showrooms in Winnipeg and Edmonton, and recently moved out of their old chicken barn headquarters on the south side of Morden to a building right in town with a 1,000 square-foot showroom and a mezzanine where customers can — and are encouraged to — select their own wood and watch the furniture being built. Wyton has eight full-time employees, which doesn’t sound like a lot when you consider it takes 300 hours to dismantle a barn. (And that doesn’t include removing every nail, brushing each board with steel to remove dust, manure and straw, and kiln-drying all of the wood for a week to get rid of any bugs and moisture.) But Wyton hires nearby farmers to help with the dismantling as well a welding company and a staining/clear- coating shop to get the job done. “The way we dismantle (the barns) is still very primitive,” he says. “It’s quite a lot of effort.” Having passionate, artistic builders who take pride in enhancing the beauty of the wood certainly helps. Plus, Wyton will gladly flee his office to lend a hand whenever he can. He still partakes in all parts of the process, but there’s nothing he loves more than building a large dining room table. “I think what gets me is just how beautiful a big piece of wood like that is. You can see so much character in it. Maybe I’m kind of sentimental, but I love the thought of how many memories are going to be made around that table that we built.” ■
december 2017
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