Custom Bar Building and Custom Bar Design

As production shops go, this is a personilized design and fabrication service company, with primary focus on custom bars, although we have the tooling and capability for all sorts of specialized woodworking: door and sash, complex stairs, unique display fixtures, custom wood furniture. Serving Texas and the rest of the world.

We don’t have stock “models” or restrictions in style or process, other than those imposed by high standards of workmanship, durability, and taste. Our goal is to meet the needs and desires of each customer, define the problem, and do it right. The work is done in my building, constructed with flexibility in mind and equipped primarily with restored vintage American-made production machinery.

A complete bar-works includes the public’s bar, the bartender’s back-bar, and a canopy, which serves the design’s completion and provides for stemware, lighting, and storage. Shown on this page are some examples of the wide range of styles I have designed and created over a long and diverse career.

The Treehouse, shown above right, takes us back to the late seventies. It was in a bar and restaurant in Austin. The owner liked my sketches, looked at some samples, and I went to the Brooklyn shipyard for a truckload of Thai rosewood and zebrawood from Cameroon.I suppose I was looking at a lot of Deco/nouveau then: concave-conical front,convex stemware canopy, leather armrest, elliptical bevelled mirrors. It was a celebrated piece.

The Texana - in a private facility on Sam Houston's old ranch at Washington-on-Brazos - I turned to more classical features, housing urns in semicircular alcoves, plinth and frieze. Here I developed shaper cutters to produce a handrail which leaves no inside corner joint, a boon to the bartender, as well as pleasing the eye. Several other bars are around, the Fredericksburg Brewing Co., etc., these being the most well photographed, and the most complete; a complete bar has a bar, backbar, and stemware canopy. Typically a fine custom bar is a "one-off", although multiples or twins are feasible.

I have provided this site in order to show you the variety in building custom bars, custom furniture, doors & sash; I also meet the needs for architecural millwork. The possibilities are endless, with materials like stone, metals- and forms and styles, still unexplored; and too many spaces are devoid of feature.Our own Texas Live Oak, of amazing beauty and hardness, suggests its use in a regional style.

A recent major pub project went to Anniston, Alabama, at a military facility. We have provided a photo gallery of the making of the Alabama, start to finish.

This sushi bar in Austin has a moat, boats full of food float around to the diners.

Contact me to discuss your project at 512-847-9686

Thank you for your interest
Dale