The Corbel: Treasures and Creations
Chances are you have seen a corbel, an architectural bracket. But if you drive too quickly down Highway 61, you might not see The Corbel, a trove of treasures. Look for the metal rooster sitting on an old cypress stump in front of a weathered picket fence and a welcoming front porch. You will be met with more than meets the eye.
The Corbel is owned by Don and Brent Charlet and their wives, Susan and Kim, offering 15,000 square feet of custom furniture, architectural salvage, flooring, gifts, antiques, and more. Their storefront celebrates its fourth anniversary this month, but their home-related careers started long ago with remodeling homes. Remodeling gave way to new home construction, which lead them to flooring when Brent’s father-in-law gave them a heads up on an old cotton gin being demolished. The brothers brought back four or five 18-wheeler loads of heart pine. This bounty turned their eyes toward demolition, which ironically has fueled their desires to create. They save everything from demolished homes—whether they demolish them or not—and turn the salvage into tables, hutches, flooring, beams, entertainment centers, wine racks, and decorative pieces.
“Everything is real symbiotic around here,” Don Charlet says. “People come in to get flooring and they go, ‘Oh, you have furniture.’ It all kind of feeds off each other.”
Most of their salvaged wood—heart pine wood—is used for flooring and comes from old beams. Some of it shows its history through old nail holes, while other pieces have the original patina remaining. Their most recent find comes from an old warehouse in New York. It’s wide plank flooring, character-ridden with circle saw marks and even the original stamps showing that it was milled in New York.
Salvaged cypress mainly goes into furniture or cabinetry. Don and Brent started building custom furniture two years ago to joyful results. One customer saw the brothers’ handiwork from start to finish. Her homestead had to be torn down before it risked falling down. Don and Brent reclaimed some of the wood from the home and made it into a table for her.
“She almost came to tears,” Don Charlet says. “Now she has something she can touch, feel, and it’s a part of her. That’s the kind of piece of furniture the kids—if they don’t put it in the will—will squabble over.”
These niche-oriented, one-of-a-kind pieces are what drive the brothers. They can make a piece from salvaged materials they have in stock, like 10-foot, oval top pocket doors from a plantation home in Tallulah, or from materials customers bring in. Currently, they are working on a custom desk for a client’s home office that will incorporate heirloom branding irons into the design as a showpiece. And there are always simpler pieces that can be done to a customer’s desired dimensions, like the 8-foot by 5.5-foot old cypress table they recently completed.
Their custom furniture and architectural salvage operation may be unfamiliar to those who have only set foot in the gift shop. But beyond the handmade Italian Fortunata ceramics and the imported Eastern European antiques are the doors that give way to custom creation. Stop by the next time you travel down Highway 61. Make a u-turn if you must. You never know what treasure you might find—or have custom made!
The Corbel
911 Highway 61
Jackson, LA
(225) 654-6016
thecorbel.com
