Kincaid Furniture introduced its Vintage Cherry collection at the Spring High Point Market, being held April 20-25 in High Point, NC. The collection bears both a distinctive design and an unusual capacity to do good.

Vintage Cherry is the fourth major collection from Hudson, NC-based Kincaid to be designated a Habitat for Humanity collection. Throughout the life of the collection, one percent of every sale will go to the well-known organization that organizes volunteers to build affordable homes.

Even though the company’s home county of Caldwell in the NC mountains is not highly populated, it has a Habitat chapter that builds from eight to 13 Habitat homes a year, Dyer says.

Its work was known to Kincaid President Steve Kincaid; the first house built in Caldwell went to a Kincaid employee in the mid-1990s. So when the company was getting ready to introduce a new line in 2010, he realized that instead of bringing in a celebrity to create a buzz,“This is a great opportunity to do something good with it.”

The Atlanta office of Habitat was contacted, and Kincaid discovered that the official they were negotiating with was not only a former resident of Hudson but his former T-ball coach.

An instant connection was established; four collections have since been dedicated to Habitat; and at least once a year, the company holds an “employee build” session to create a house on its own.

“Myself and Steve Kincaid took a room and did all the fiberglass insulation, says Dyer. Considering the talent and experience that Kincaid employees represent, he says, “We’re not a bad crew.”

To achieve authenticity in the collections aged look, Kincaid not only made escutcheons that work, it created realistic decorative grooves in a dining table by offsetting the layup of the boards, then running them only partly through a planer before hand-planing and hand-sanding them.

In the earlier era that inspires the collection, says Director of Marketing Maxwell Dyer, “Nobody had a widebelt sander.” And besides, they didn’t want to “burn through the joints” they’d worked so hard to create.