By Jon Bartholomew—Currently the Corporate VP of Chateau Mill & Supply

 

I was only about 6 years old when the company started so I cannot tell you a lot about the early years.  Chateau Mill & Supply had humble beginnings in 1973 in Sandy, Utah.  My uncle, Terry Orton, was one of the founders.  Within a year or so, a few of my other uncles and my Dad had joined forces with the company and they relocated it in the old school building in Franklin, Idaho. 

 

The building was drafty and heated by a giant coal burning boiler.  It was 3 stories tall and the company occupied the bottom two floors.  It took a little remodeling to make it work as a cabinet shop.  There were two sets of stairs initially and one of them was removed to make room for an elevator (of sorts) to carry cabinet materials from downstairs to upstairs for assembly and finishing. 

 

I remember working summers there as a young teenager.  We (my brother , Marlin, and I) would sweep up the plethora of sawdust and shaper shavings and clean up the wood scraps and stack them in the coal room to be burned in the old boiler.  When I was old enough for full time summer work I spent my summers in the Sanding room.  The building was of course separated into classrooms, and one of them was designated the sanding room.  It had west facing windows and the summers were intolerable, sweating in the dusty room! Luckily I was moved to building drawers and then onto cabinets as I was old enough to run the cutting tools.

 

Chateau was located in that building until about 1987 when the city denied renewing the lease.  Chateau went looking for a new home and ended up purchasing the old McCune Motors building, previously a Ford dealership on West Oneida, in Preston, Idaho.  Soon after this move to Preston, with the country in recession and financial troubles in the company, many of the partners involved in its leadership opted to leave the company.  My father, Max Bartholomew, remained as the sole owner of Chateau Mill & Supply.  Times were lean, and though the company had enjoyed some years of record sales, and had employed 25—30 employees, at one point it was reduced to three people; Dad, my brother-in-law, and Alex Golightly.

 

Much remained the same with the construction of the cabinets over the years, though some of the materials were changing.  Ash hardwood doors on a cabinet with Alder wood face frames and fir plywood cabinet box were the norm for many years, but the late eighties saw people exploring different options for cabinet woods.  Chateau pioneered the rustic woods market in the area by offering cabinets  build of Knotty Maple.  In the early nineties, we worked directly with the owners of hardwood mills back east to develop a grade of maple that was both rustic, colorful and sound. 

 

Cabinet box materials were changing too.  Many companies sprouted up building a “European style” cabinet that is frameless and made of melamine clad particle board.  Domestic supplies of fir plywood were getting scarce (in favor of the spotted owl) and Chateau Mill was looking for a replacement material.  Baltic Birch plywood entered the marked about then and we found in it a stable and good looking cabinet interior that was a superior product to the domestic plywood available.  Baltic Birch’s 1/2” thick version has 9 “plys” or layers of birch.  It also comes in other thicknesses, but we found that the 1/2” version was a good match for our style of construction and was much stronger than the 3/4” melamine clad particle board we were competing against.

 

Sometime in the mid-nineties, we decided that maybe we should offer both styles of cabinets.  We displayed a Euro style cabinet as well as our traditional “All Wood” model hoping to catch both markets.  Inevitably, however, when people saw both and were left to choose between them, they always chose the all wood cabinet.  Price was not much an issue as it took nearly as much to build the euro cabinet, and the value and looks of the wood cabinet nearly always won out. 

 

Tragedy struck on a cold Sunday night in January of 2007.  Chateau had recently posted a near record year building and installing nearly a million dollars worth of custom cabinet.  The backroom was stacked with about 4 completed projects waiting for customers to be ready for delivery.  The floor of the shop was also near capacity with work in progress. 

 

A fire requiring three departments to control, broke out sometime Sunday evening on the 28th of January.  It was a hazardous f ire and  emergency response people would not enter the structure, but waited for the roof to collapse so the flames could be extinguished. 

We were in  a quandary as to how react to these events.  In a phone interview with a Salt Lake City news anchor, I expressed my feelings.  I said my biggest concerns were for our employees and the customers to whom we felt an obligation to serve.  The current leadership of the company (Max as majority owner, Marlin , my brother as corporate president, myself as corporate v.p. and Alex Golightly as corporate secretary) met for breakfast Monday morning after the fire.  The embers were literally still warm and we were meeting to decide the destiny of our company.  We decided that even with the uncertainty of the future, we would give the effort our all and rebuild. 

 

 

We began to plan, meet with contractors, insurance people etc, about getting a new building started.  We also began to look for a home for our processes in the interim.  The hand of providence (or indeed the hand of God) seamed to be on our side through it all.  We found we had friends who would give of their resources to help us out, and customer loyalty that extended contracts already in process.  There was trust in our company even though there was nothing left of the building that housed it!. 

 

 

We estimated it would take 6 months to build a building and get moved in.  In the mean time we set up in several locations.  We were immediately housed in the Moser Truss shop at the insistent charity of Stacy Moser.  He had half a shop he was not using.  We got our employees busy setting it up and had built our first cabinet after the fire within 4 weeks of the fire.  We entirely rebuilt the first of the destroyed finished projects within 6 weeks.  I worked on the new building (plans, site prep, contractor bids and meetings etc), and everyone else got to work building cabinets.  We  cut the solid wood in Weston in Dad’s garage.  He had a table saw and a planer there.  We cut sheet goods and assembled in the Moser truss facility.  We staked our materials in a freight container outside.  We arranged with Steve, the owner of an auto body repair shop, to use his paint booth and several of his storage units to house our paint shop and prep cabinets for delivery.  Business went on and 2007 ended up being another banner year for sales for the company. 

 

It took  a little longer than we thought to build a building.  It’s complicated. Especially if it is something you have never done before.  We asked a lot of questions and got a lot of good advice and hired some fine professional help.  We opened the shop to full production in April of 2008, 14 months after the fire.  Our open house followed a few months later.  We recovered well financially, using only assets in hand for the full cost of construction of the new facility.  Between insurance revenues and the sale of the old building site to the city of Preston, we are able to work in a building free of debt.  It is truly a blessing in these uncertain economic times.

 

So here we are.  Still building cabinets the old fashioned way.  The way we always have.  We have better equipment to do it with and the materials available today are better than we have ever had.   We are doing what we have always done, building a great cabinet, custom designed to fit the needs and the homes of our clients, giving them good value at a fair price.