ART & DESIGN: RECLAIMED WOOD, RECLAIMED LIFE
GHOSTWOOD INTERIORS AND LANDMARK DESIGNS
By Nathan Dell / Photos by Carter Photographics

Six years ago Mark Mathis wanted a new job. As the owner of an event marketing business, he was on the road more than 100 days a year promoting various products at festivals, concerts and other big events. With a young family back at home, Mark and his wife Karen decided to reclaim their family life by starting a new furniture business.

Mark’s original furniture designs, some of which were admitted failures in his home workshop, mirrored his desire to reclaim his life by incorporating reclaimed or recycled wood products. Mark and Karen liked the look, and the reclaimed wood eventually became an integral part of Ghostwood Interiors as well as the couple’s wholesale line known as Landmark Designs. Karen says, “All of our wood comes from reclaimed wood from old barns, old cabins, old fence lines, grain elevators, and other historic structures.” That is the origin of the name Landmark Designs as well as the idea behind Ghostwood.

Mark and Karen feel that using reclaimed wood “just makes sense” for the environment. Although statistics showing exact numbers are difficult to track down, the general consensus in the industry is that reclaimed and recycled wood products are becoming more and more popular with consumers. “Anecdotally, we hear that more and more people are using reclaimed lumber,” says Bob Falk, a research engineer at the USDA Forest Products Laboratory as quoted online in the National Geographic Green Guide.

The Green Guide states that the United States consumes about one quarter of the world’s forest products, a majority of this for home building and furnishings. The U.S. Forest Service has estimated that an average home requires 88 trees, or 3.2 acres of forest. Advocates claim reused and recycled woods are good for the planet by preserving the remaining old-growth forests and lowering the burden on new timber harvesting. Reclaimed wood furniture is something the conscientious consumer can feel good about purchasing.

The Ghostwood designs are eco-friendly, but they are also made to show off the old wood. Using reclaimed andrecycled wood builds character right into the furniture and makes each piece unique. “It’s almost like creating an antique from scratch,”Karen says.

Each blackened nail hole, burl, knot and insect mark from the reused wood makes even identically designed pieces into unique creations. Karen often tells customers, “If you custom-order a piece, it will be built like this and look like this and feel like this, but it won’t have that particular grain mark and that particular knot in those spots … kind of like a work of art.”

Mark is an artist at tracking down old structures and sources for the wood he uses in his designs. Many of the most recent pieceson the showroom floor have been created using wood from the historic Hermosa Dairy Barn near Parshall which dates back to 1906. Another find resulted in the reusing of a wooden grain elevator transported to Colorado from Illinois during a visit to Karen’s childhood home. Each piece of furniture constructed in the workshop comes with a certificate of authenticity that outlines the source of the historic wood used in the construction.

The pile of dirty, beat-up, crooked wood stacked in random piles in the workshop’s basement seems an unlikely beginning for the striking furniture in the showroom. However, the painstaking process of removing nails, ripping and sanding, reveals the rich character hidden beneath the weathered surface of each old board. The resulting look is not only visually appealing but also less likely to shrink and warp in the extremely dry humidity of the Colorado mountains.

Over the last six years the couple’s wholesale Landmark Designs has gradually grown. They now are sold in 10 to 12 states.

Much of the furniture is sold in those states’ mountain communities, pastoral, country settings and lake districts where the architecture and lifestyle fit in with the natural world. However, Karen has been surprised at some of the settings where rustic furniture shows up. “People’s styles are becoming more eclectic all the time,” she said. “So you’re finding even in an urban setting like Chicago, you might find a clunky piece of really rustic wood furniture paired with chrome and metal and leather. It’s a little more Spartan the way they treat it, instead of putting a lot of accessories with it, but you find this stuff everywhere.”

Catering to the customer is what Ghostwood is all about. The couple estimates that at least 60 percent of their sales are custom-designed orders. Ghostwood welcomes clients to become involved in the creation process. According to Karen, some of them come in and say, “‘I really like that table; could you make it a couple inches taller?’ and that’s the end of it.” Others come in with detailed drawings and precise angles and measurements. One Ghostwood customer didn’t so much get involved in drawings and design, but came and visited their piece during its construction three times. “Six weeks start to finish and they came three times to see it in progress. At the end, they took pictures with all the guys.”

Karen and Mark have both been surprised at the consistent interest visitors have in seeing the furniture workshop. Customers with a woodworking hobby or an interest in the assembly process often take a tour of the workshop at the back of the store. The couple is always glad to show it. Karen says, “Many times, they will see something in the back that is headed to someone else and come back and say, ‘I never thought of that, can you make that?’”

The process actually works bothways. Some of the innovations and new styles in their furniture incorporate customer’s ideas and unique requests. “For instance, we had not done shelving before,” Karen notes. “We just recently did a set of shelving for some customers, so we thought, ‘Let’s make an extra set. We’ll rearrange after the holidays, and we’ll get that up and show it off.’ Everybody’s got good ideas, I think.”

Despite their success, Kremmling still seems an unlikely place for a highend furniture store. When asked, Karen replies that the town is near their home along Highway 9 and that they were able to afford a much larger and more visible location in Kremmling than they ever could have purchased in Summit County. She named several recent improvements to businesses in downtown Kremmling and said it was “fun to be a part of that momentum.” Indeed, the momentum seems to be rolling Mark and Karen’s way. Along with Ghostwood Interiors and Landmark Designs, Mark is also working furiously to build a wood pellet plant to put Grand County’s abundant beetle kill pine to profitable and ecologically sound use. Karen says, “There are just so many things to do to get where we want to go.”


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