Chris Bradley sees wood differently from the average person.

“I’ve always loved the artistry of the natural product that wood is, and the entirety of its lifespan – from a tiny little seed into a full tree, into processed lumber, into furniture or houses, after which the wood can then be reprocessed again and turned into more things,” he said. “It’s this continuingly renewable resource that we have available to us, and it’s an amazing product to be able to utilize. I’ve always had a fascination with it.”

It should be no surprise that someone with that kind of perspective has built a lifetime resume of creating artistic and functional pieces of all kinds. Having lived and worked in Georgia for almost a decade, he recently was the manager of BarnBeautiful, a furniture and home goods carpentry store in Stockbridge which is now closed, and is now working solely through his own company, Corbin Carpentry.

“Carpentry has always been a fascination for me, and woodworking in general,” said

Bradley. “Most of what I do is custom work.”

Bradley’s projects have been a healthy mix of the common and the very specialized.

He has done art restoration work on wood sculptures. He has built tiny homes in their entirety from the ground up. He has done installation work, gas, plumbing, HVAC – “a little bit of everything at one point or another,” as he put it.

One client in particular, with whom he began working through BarnBeautiful, has allowed him to craft some truly one-of-a-kind pieces.

She has come up with these brilliant designs that are incredibly artistic and have a lot of changing angles and complex shapes. It has been really challenging to figure out how all of those different angles and components fit together,” he said. “It has been a real joy to work on pieces like that, because they are completely unique. There’s no other piece on the planet like it. It’s really cool to get an opportunity to work on something like that.”

In an era when big-box stores and the Internet make it so easy to buy a carbon copy of what everyone else has, Bradley is pleased that a sizable portion of the marketplace is still interested in investing in custom work.

“I would say that in the past five to ten years there has been a steady change in what I’ve noticed from a consumer standpoint, as far as people appreciating more of where a product comes from than just the product itself,” he said. “There is more visibility for makers and artists to be able to put their work out there and see it appreciated by many more people than it would have in the past. I think a lot of that has to do with social media.”

Word of mouth has been sufficient enough to keep Bradley busy of late, but he is gearing up his new website, corbincarpentry.com, in hopes of increasing his exposure. Samples of his work can also be seen on his Instagram page @corbincustomcarpentry.

By Monroe Roark