Grafton furniture repair shop still working its magic

Customers come from as far as Madison and Green Bay to bring their damaged chairs, tables, dressers — even sleds and sculptures — to carpenter Brian Gentz, owner of Abracadabra Furniture Repair in Grafton.

While they choose Gentz because of his more than three decades of experience repairing residential and office furniture, they don’t have many options, he said.

“When I started, I had five competitors in Grafton alone and now I have none,” Gentz said. There are only a handful of furniture carpenters in Ozaukee County. Gentz’s closest competitors are a carpenter in Fredonia who is typically booked a year in advance and two shops in Mequon.

Abracadabra has maintained a steady six-to-eight-week backlog for several years, Gentz said.

“We are busy because there are less and less people doing it. The work has to go somewhere, so it goes here,” he said.

Since he opened Abracadabra in 1999, Gentz said, many of his competitors, most of whom were baby boomers, reached retirement age and simply shut their doors, failing to find anyone with the years of carpentry experience required to take over their shop.

  “I’m 50 and I am one of the youngest in the field,” Gentz said.

He understands how it happens. He’ll likely be Abracadabra’s first and last owner.

“Behind me, my kids won’t take over,” he said. His son is an electrical engineering student and his daughter is planning to become a physical therapy doctor.

“I have maybe 15 more years of doing this, then I’ll do the same thing as the baby boomers and walk out and shut the door when I’m done,” he said.

People’s relationship to their furniture has changed over the years, he said.

It’s become less common for furniture to pass from generation to generation as it’s become more affordable to purchase new furniture from cheap retailers than repair existing pieces, Gentz said.

That new furniture, Gentz said, is often built from shoddy materials and doesn’t last.

“The quality isn’t there. You’re buying pieces of plywood stapled together. None of those things are going to stay together,” he said.

About half of his business is multi-generational furniture, he said, like a baby chair he recently fixed that an 80-year-old customer used as a baby.

Even with the industry shrinking and changing, Gentz doesn’t think furniture repair will go away.

“It’s a slowly dying thing, but I don’t think it will ever go way,” Gentz said. “My reach is getting larger and larger. When I started, my furthest customer was 15 miles away. Now they’re 100 or 150 miles away.”

He said he drives as far as Lake Geneva for one long-time customer who doesn’t have any other options in the area.

Gentz learned carpentry from his father, who owned an upholstery shop.

Initially, Gentz did interior finished carpentry, but he soon shifted to furniture wood refinishing. Starting in 1993, he did that as a part of his father’s business in Menominee Falls before opening Abracadabra in 1999.

“The first five years I didn’t make a dime. You keep your hands in all sorts of areas. You go into the hole and hope to  God you come out,” Gentz said.

After almost three decades of furniture repair, Gentz said, each piece of furniture brings unique challenges.

“Even after 25 years of doing this, I’m still learning. Everything is evolving,” he said, noting that new stains and finishes are always coming out and some pieces of furniture may require four or five different tones to match the existing lacquer.

That challenge is what makes the job so rewarding. Gentz said he gets to see the immediate results of his work not only in the restored piece of furniture but from customers.

“I see it through the whole process. The customers see it as a piece of junk and then it’s redone and it shocks them,” he said. “I’ve had customers cry because it was their dad’s favorite chair, and they remember being rocked in it.

“I probably get three or four criers a year.”

Most of his customers are 60 years or older, and more than three-quarters are women, Gentz said.

“The women are in charge of the home. It’s the way that generation is,” he said.

He thinks he gets customers of an older demographic because that’s an age where most people can catch a breath, look around their house and make improvements.

“They get to 60 and their kids are gone and they don’t yet have grandkids to screw it up, so they decide to fix things up,” Gentz said.

Gentz also does carpentry for golf clubs and offices, as well as custom work for furniture stores and repairs for furniture damaged by moving companies.

The Covid-19 pandemic caused a major, temporary spike in business, Gentz said.

“Over Covid I got very, very busy here, but that didn’t last,” he said. “Everybody was at home and not in the office, so I didn’t do a lot of conference tables or things like that I would normally do. Everyone was sitting at home and looking at their furniture.”

Gentz said he fixes anything “wood related-ish.”

“I get the weirdest stuff,” he said, noting he’s fixed wooden giraffes that got damaged in transit from Africa and once restored a concrete monkey statue.

“People come in and ask if I can do something. I often say, ‘I’ll try.’”

Abracadabra does both wood refinishing and upholstery, which is relatively unique for furniture repair shops. Gentz’s father helps with the upholstery work.

Gentz said Abracadabra is restoring the upholstery in the caboose at Pioneer Village in the Town of Saukville. In 2006, he and his wife worked on the furniture team for the “Antiques Road Show” television show.

The name — Abracadabra — was picked to put him at the top of the Yellow Pages, Gentz said.

“We also thought about how people bring stuff in a pile of pieces in a box, and it leaves put back together looking great,” he said. “I used to have radio ads that said, ‘It’s like magic.’”