By Ali Butler

Aaron Cabeen’s custom furniture business, Cabeen Originals, makes unique pieces from reclaimed and salvaged wood.  “First of all, you get a ton of character out of the wood and it fits along with the green movement by not taking out any new trees,” he says.

Being the son of a carpenter influenced Cabeen’s career in woodmaking. At age 10 he began working with his hands to help his father at job sites. “I spent my summers helping out my dad, so he instilled a strong work ethic in me,” Cabeen says.

The Chattanooga native also was inspired by local woodworkers he met while remodeling homes. “Instead of getting a stock cabinet, these people put in a lot of creativity and they really were artists,” he says. “I thought, you know what, I’m going to give it a shot.”

Cabeen started making items in his backyard and officially established his business in June 2008. After moving Cabeen Originals to the Business Development Center in January 2009, he says the business has benefitted from the great location and good working environment.

He started out with a simple coffee table and now has pieces ranging from sink basins to kitchen islands. All of the wood for these creations comes from local sawmills within a 200- mile radius. According to Cabeen, where there were once some 90 million acres of heart pine forest, less than 10,000 acres remain in the region. In other words, what was once 41 percent of the entire landmass of the Deep South now covers less than two percent of its original range.

These statistics are incentive for Cabeen to avoid taking any trees out of the forest. Besides benefiting the environment, using recycled wood means that each piece has a unique history. The furniture is made one piece at a time, so that owners truly have an original piece, as the business name promises.

Cabeen works with oak, walnut, maple, cedar, cherry, sweet gum, ash and box elder wood. But he says heart pine is his favorite. “It is a really stable, local wood that has so much character,” he says. “No one can duplicate the story that the wood has attached to it. It has local roots that are linked to this region’s history.”

Cabeen Originals’ pieces can be found in a number of places around Chattanooga including the Terminal BrewHouse, where he built all of the eatery’s 27 tables and vanities for the four bathrooms using wood recycled from the back floor of the restaurant.

“By using local wood,” he says, “we can rally around the art that we create as Americans and see the beauty in what we have here.”

Cabeen Originals is located in Suite 333 of the Business Development Center, 100 Cherokee Blvd. He can be reached at 423.413.5897 or aaron@cabeenoriginals.com.