Crafting for royalty: Small South Carolina furniture-makers create special gift for the Queen

When a family-owned furniture shop raced against a tight deadline to craft a unique wooden box for President Trump, it marked a pivotal moment for their family and business.

YORK, S.C. — The phone rang. It echoed through the Leake Furniture Makers workshop. Jay Leake was cutting wood, while his dad, John Howard Leake III, was in the finishing room. Jay took the call.

A woman spoke. This wasn’t the first time Jay had heard from her. She worked for the White House.

“We have a special project in mind,” she said. “But it’s going to need to happen pretty quick.”

Jay, 38, whose full name is John Howard Leake IV, got requests from her often. The two-man business in York, South Carolina, run by Jay and his father, specializes in 18th-century American furniture styles and has made several wooden boxes with eagle inlays for the White House. The boxes are gifts to visiting foreign diplomats.

Still, this request was different.

They had six days to construct a four-by-five-inch, hand-crafted wooden box — that would hold a Tiffany brooch — for President Donald Trump to give to the Queen of England when he visited last June.

Jay put the phone back in its sawdust-covered charging dock, walked into the finishing room and interrupted his dad.

“We got a call from the White House,” Jay said. “They need this special box made.”

Before they got to work, they sat in the office at the front of their workshop. John leaned back in his orange desk chair, held together with duct tape. Jay sat across from him.

“Here’s a chance to represent No. 1, the United States,” Jay said. “No. 2, our town — York. And No. 3, our family business. It was a lot of pressure. It was a lot of pressure just knowing where this thing was going.”

***

Jay’s grandfather, John Howard Leake Jr. – who went by “Buddy” — had unexpectedly passed away in 1983.

Jay’s dad, John Howard Leake III, was teaching shop in the Gaston County school system. A brother called in the middle of the day and gave him the news.

John hung up the phone and sat in silence.

“I got to go home,” John told the principal. “There’s been a death in my family.”

John’s dad worked for the family business, known at the time as Leake’s Antiques. He traveled the country collecting antiques and selling them in York. John’s grandfather — John Howard Leake Sr. — started the business in the 1950s.

“My grandfather worked hard,” John said. “Prior to his antiques thing, he was farming. He came home one day with a sideboard tied to sacks of feed on his truck. That’s how he got started. He was calling on homes all throughout the country and would find stuff.”

A sideboard, also known as a buffet, is a piece of furniture usually used in dining rooms to display serving dishes.

Buddy continued the business until his death.

John left work after he got the call.

“That was a long drive back home from Gaston County,” he said.

***

John drew up a few sketches for the box requested by the White House. Jay figured out the dimensions. But they couldn’t do much without the wood.

The White House would overnight wood that came off the White House grounds.

The woman gave Jay clear instructions.

“The wood will be there Thursday,” she told him. “But we need the box in our hands the following Thursday to get on the plane Friday.”

She had called on Wednesday.

At 8 a.m. that Thursday, the delivery truck pulled up on the dirt driveway in front of the Leake’s workshop. The delivery man came to the front door of the house that Buddy built in the 1950s.

“He’s standing there with a not-so-big box,” John said. “And I’m thinking, ‘Oh no. I was expecting at least a log or two.’”

The father and son usually use large lumber boards to make the eight-by-12-inch boxes.

“He gave us the box and it didn’t weigh nothing,” John said. “We came over here and dumped it out and here’s this little pile. It looked like something we’d be throwing in the wood stove.”

The White House had sent several quarter-inch thick strips of wood that were 15-20 inches long and four inches wide. The White House didn’t specify what type of wood it was.

“We kept messing with it and we could smell it and know how it worked,” Jay said. “We think it was basswood. We think — which is not particularly pretty.”

***

Around the time of his father’s death, John was getting frustrated with his teaching career.

“The school system was just not a good fit for me,” John said. “I guess maybe I expected a little bit more than I was getting. I was already beginning to get a bit frustrated with it, and I had 22 more years to go, and that seemed like a life sentence to me.”

Furniture-making was his passion.

“My earliest and oldest memories are here fooling with furniture,” said John, who now is 65. “These buildings were packed full of it.”

He took shop in high school. And although he admits he got in the habit of skipping classes, he’d always make sure to go to shop class.

“My shop teacher — see the shops are usually on the back edge of the building somewhere — he’d let me come in the back door and I’d take my shop class,” he said.

In 11th grade, he won the Golden Hammer for being the best shop student. The hammer hangs on his office wall — right above the orange desk chair.

To make extra money while he was teaching, John built furniture on the weekends and in the summer.

When his dad passed, there was no question that John would take over the family antique business.

“I was about to become self-employed,” John said. “It was scary. I felt this need, or this urge or this want, to come into our family thing.”

So, he finished the school year and took over Leake’s Antiques. But he continued to build furniture.

“I was a furniture maker at heart,” he said.

***

Jay planned to finish the box the following Monday. The White House wanted a specific image engraved on top.

“It was an image of the White House,” Jay said. “And I kept looking at it. They emailed me the image. It was a version of the White House I had never seen before.”

Jay figured out the image was a depiction of the  White House before it was burned in the War of 1812.

He asked a nearby sign store to use its laser cutter to engrave the image. Jay had built the base of the box over the weekend. He planned to coat the box with an oil finish on Tuesday, so it would be dry in time to be shipped on Wednesday.

But on Monday morning he had most of the box finished and hadn’t heard from the sign store.

“I went down there that Monday morning about eight o’clock hoping they were open and working,” Jay said. “And they were. I said, ‘Have y’all gotten to this engraving?’ They said, ‘Well, we’re going to try to get to it today or tomorrow.’”

His stomach dropped.

“I told them, ‘Man, I need this thing today,’” he said.

The store was able to do the engraving and Jay finished the box on time.

“We were extremely proud to be asked to do it, and honored to do it,” Jay said. “It was probably the highlight of our careers here making something that ended up in the Queen’s hands. There’s not too many people who can say that.”

That Wednesday morning, the delivery truck pulled up to the house on the dirt driveway and Jay handed the packaged box to the delivery man.

“Be careful,” Jay told the man. “Be careful with this.”

***

After a few years in business alone, John realized it was too much to sell antiques and build furniture.

“It was an absolute gut-wrenching thing for me for a number of years what to do about that,” John said. “See, being a third generation, that means a lot to me that my grandparents and then my dad and then me, using the same name. I’m old fashioned as heck, so I knew when Jay came along he was going to be the fourth.”

He chose furniture making.

Jay joined the business in 2004 and shortly after that, the Leake’s Antiques sign was replaced and now reads “Leake Furniture Makers.”

“I’m sure my grandaddy rolled over in his grave a couple of times when that sign up there went out,” John said. “I think now he would be very, very pleased with what we are doing. He would just be pleased that his building is still here being used for the furniture business.”

Neither John nor Jay knows how the White House found out about their work. After the business was featured in the Charleston-based “Garden and Gun” magazine in 2014, they started receiving furniture inquiries from across the country. They have pieces in California, Texas, D.C., Louisiana, Mississippi, Virginia, Pennsylvania and Delaware.

John thinks someone in the D.C. area who bought furniture from them may have mentioned their name to the White House. Jay chalks it up to luck.

“We’re just simple people that just happen to make furniture and make it for a living, which is tough,” Jay said. “If success means making furniture that’s across the country, maybe in the White House, or wherever, I mean that’s good, but it’s still hard to make a living.”

***

As for the box for the Queen, Jay just knows it got there.

“I guess the Queen is happy,” he said. “We had to put felt in the very bottom of it, but we cut a little hole out of the felt and engraved in the bottom of it, ‘Made by John and Jay Leake, York, South Carolina, U.S.A.’”

They’ve made about 15 boxes for the White House. They never know where the boxes end up, but they know one was given to the Prime Minister of Australia. The father-son duo engrave their names on the bottom of each box.

“We may not have antiques here anymore,” Jay said. “But we’re making pieces that will become antiques years from now.”