Meet Brian Benham of Benham Design Concepts in Rural

Today we’d like to introduce you to Brian Benham.

Brian, before we jump into specific questions, why don’t you give us some details about you and your story.
My father worked in the construction industry, so naturally, I grew up around all kinds of construction work from all different trades. As our family grew, my dad decided it was time to build an addition onto the house, to add another bedroom and bathroom. I spent that entire summer watching each trade work, from the framer to the plumber and electrician and finally the trim carpenter. Some trades were annoyed that this little eight-year-old kid was watching them; others were thrilled and showed me what they were doing.

It wasn’t long until I discovered the PBS channel and shows like This Old House, The New Yankee Workshop, and The Woodwright’s Shop. Most kids talked about the Saturday Morning cartoons they watched; I talked about the woodworking shows I watched. The Woodwright’s Shop was one of my favorites, Roy Underhill was the host, and he made everything by hand. Naturally, my mom was scared to let a little boy use power tools, and she had a rule, no power tools, until your Dad gets home. With that rule in place, I was forced to use only hand tools so I could relate to Roy and his methods of work. Ironically, it was a slip with a sharp chisel that earned me my first set of stitches at the ER.

After watching Roy build something, I would head out to the garage, pull out some scrap wood leftover from one of my Dad’s projects and get to work with my Dad’s hand tools to try to recreate what I saw Roy build. There were a lot of failures in those younger years, but I didn’t let that stop me.

By the time I was 13, I had my first construction job, I was the shop helper so to speak for a bridge construction company. I worked their almost every summer while going to school. This was a fascinating place to work. The amount of engineering that goes into building a bridge is impressive. I spent most of my time working in the fabrication shop where we pre-built a lot of the components for the bridges such as earthquake restraints, and other brackets. I learned so much working here, not only construction skills but problem-solving skills. If there was ever a tool or something, we needed to get the job done, we often just made it ourselves using what we had on hand. This was eye-opening, the thought that you don’t have to go to the store to buy something when you can just make it, opened my mind to all kinds of new ideas.

Then in my mid 20’s, I took a job as a project manager at a design/remodel construction company. Our focus was on designing and remodeling high-end kitchens and bathrooms. My favorite part of this job was on the design aspect of the projects. The owner had recently purchased a custom cabinet company. This really propelled my passion for design, to once again have all the tooling you need to make anything you want. Unfortunately, this all came to an end in 2008 when the housing market collapsed. The company I was working for filed for bankruptcy, and I leaped to selling building materials at a big box store. This was the most soul-crushing job I had ever had, all the rules of what we could and could not do for our customers. They could have hung a sign in the break room that said “creativity not allowed,” and nobody would have disputed it. Some good did come out of this job. This whole time, since I was eight years old, I held onto my love of woodworking and built furniture as a hobby. One of my co-workers at the big box store had a hobby as a potter, so we would spend our downtime talking about the design and shapes of pottery and furniture. He knew I hated working there and encouraged me to start my own furniture design business. He kept telling me that I was young enough to fail and still recover, and not to wait until I was an old man like him. So, in 2010, I started Benham Design Concepts to design and fabricate custom furniture.

Overall, has it been relatively smooth? If not, what were some of the struggles along the way?
It was a rough start. I had no idea how to market the type of furniture I wanted to build, nor did I have the money to do so. But little by little, one thing led to another, and I started to get a steady stream of customers. One day I was delivering a small side table to a client that lived in the loft of a condominium. I got on the elevator with the table at the same time one of the other residences got on. He looked at my table and commented on how much he liked the design. I handed him my business card and told him I made it. A few weeks went by, and I got an email from him wanting to commission me to build a piece for him, and that is pretty much how the last ten years of customer acquisition has gone. Now when someone asks me what I do, I don’t say I’m a furniture maker, I say I make cool stuff, and hand them my card. If they are intrigued by my vague response, they go check out my website. Most of my clients now are return clients, referrals, or some weird chance meeting where I handed them a business card, and they were intrigued enough to go to my website to see what it is I do for a living.

Benham Design Concepts – what should we know? What do you guys do best? What sets you apart from the competition?
My primary business is designing custom pieces of furniture that are more than your standard furniture but act as pieces of art. I often take inspiration from my clients; one client had a collection of aviation parts and had a compressor from a jet engine he wanted to display artfully. I designed a coffee table that would interact with the engine in a way that it looked as if the glass part of the table was being fired from the engine. One client had a 1950’s era model train collection, so I designed a shelf that had a tunnel in it for the train to go through. Then, of course, I have my passion projects. I always want to keep learning new ways of creating things and work with new materials. Recently I started working more with copper and adding various types of patinas to it. It was an interesting exercise and on how to incorporate the copper into my woodworking. The series of wall hanging clocks I just finished up really took on a life of their own. By the time I finished creating them, I had realized that I needed to stop thinking of them as clocks, but more as paintings that incorporate natural wood materials, and the copper was the canvas. Having a clock in it was just part of the subject matter.

Where do you see your industry going over the next 5-10 years? Any big shifts, changes, trends, etc?
I try not to put a lot of time into worrying about where the trends are going and what the latest big fade is. I always baffled why people what the same things as what others have.

Last year I built cabinets for a client’s home office from walnut and inlaid patinated copper into a grid on the door fronts. Out of all the kitchens I had remodeled in the past, I had never seen doors like this before. I felt my design accomplished all the expectations my clients had, as well as gave them an original piece of art for the office. When I finished the job and stood in the middle of the room with the client. There was an awkward silence that left me wondering if he liked the end result or not. Then he turned to me and said. “I hired an interior designer, and got four different bids to do this office. You are the only one who didn’t bid white cabinets. If you have a moment, I’d like to talk to you about designing my next project.”

So ignoring the trends has helped me build a client base that enjoys the unusual and appreciates original design regardless of what the latest trend is.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.benhamdesignconcepts.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/benham_design/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/BenhamDesignConcepts
• Other: https://www.behance.net/Brian_Benham

Image Credit:
Brian Benham

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