Art Of Woodwork and Design Charleston, LLC   

February 28, 2008

By Jasiri Whipper (Contact)

Tourists come from miles around to admire a city known for its architecture: Charleston's verandas, columns, windows, doors and shutters are all sources of admiration.

For years, Bernie LeBoeuf and his team of woodwork associates at Art of Woodwork & Design LLC, a small North Charleston company, have quietly worked to construct and restore many of the architectural woodwork elements that have made Charleston a popular tourist destination.

Restoration work is the backbone of his company.

"If (there) weren't people like us to do the work, there wouldn't be a downtown Charleston," he said.

LeBoeuf, a West Ashley resident, is most proud of the company's woodwork at the Charleston County Courthouse on Broad Street in downtown Charleston. They started that project in the late 1990s and finished in 2000.

"Everything you see in there (in terms of woodwork), we furnished and installed," LeBoeuf said.

Jasiri Whipper/The Post and Courier

These two Chris Craft type boats are built from leftover wood at Art of Woodwork & Design in North Charleston. The company is going green and looks for opportunities to use leftover wood for boats and other projects.

 

Around the same time, the company completed work at the award-winning McCrady's restaurant on East Bay Street. Virtually all the woodwork from the two-story bar to the bathrooms was furnished by LeBoeuf and his associates. In addition to the many architectural projects, the company creates doors that can sustain hurricane-force winds up to 140 mph and Chris Craft boats made from wood left over from construction projects.

LeBoeuf, an Aiken native, was born into a woodwork and construction family. His grandfather, Donald LeBoeuf, taught him how to whittle when he was 5. His third cousin, Norman LeBoeuf of Vergennes, Vt., owns H.J. LeBoeuf & Son Inc., a successful woodwork contracting company that is more than a century old.

The woodwork business is in his blood, LeBoeuf said. He studied at Midlands Technical College before working at several lumber and woodwork companies around Columbia. After a two-year stint at a company in Rhode Island, he opened LeBoeuf Architectural Woodwork, which is now Art of Woodwork & Design. At the Art of Woodwork factory, LeBoeuf works alongside three full-time craftsmen, who fashion all manner of architectural pieces from an assortment of woods, including mahogany, teak and heartwood pine "It's an art," said Darrin Bosley, who has been with LeBoeuf for about a year. "The best way to explain it is you're taking an idea out of somebody's head and creating it."

Bosley believes the company is helping to re-create Charleston as it is known through the many history books that chronicle the city's architectural beauty.

Danny Dandridge of Historical Repairs and Maintenance restores homes in peninsular Charleston and has worked with LeBoeuf for more than a decade. Dandridge works on homes that are hundreds of years old and call for specific restoration elements.

LeBoeuf often supplies his company with custom windows, shutters, doors and molding. Dandridge praises LeBoeuf for his dedication to quality craftsmanship.

"I feel blessed to work with a craftsman the quality of Bernie to keep Charleston's homes restored and conserved," he said.