Lifelong local and woodworker Eric Rudolf, pictured above, launched Fernature in 2020 with his sister Lilli and her fiancé Ike Pouliot. The three pooled their tools and their talents — carpentry, construction, engineering and considerable wood-whispering fluency. The shop is headquarted at 144 Cliff St. (Photo by Reilly Dixon)
Fernature fetes five years
- Published: November 4, 2026
In five years, how much wood could a woodshop work? For Yellow Springs-based Fernature, quite a bit. More and more, in fact.
Business has been good for the homegrown, family-run shop, the three Fernature owners told the News in a recent interview. A five-year anniversary open house on Sept. 28 drew a crowd of 100-or-so friends, family and local woodworking buffs — many of whom went home with a handmade cutting board, along with a bit of sawdust on their socks.
It was a good turnout, siblings Eric and Lilli Rudolf and Ike Pouliot reported. Better yet, they said, it was a positive presage of what’s still to come.
“Winters can be tough,” Eric Rudolf admitted.
“It’s when people don’t really want their homes disrupted by big projects,” his sister added.
Not so this time around. In the coming months, Fernature’s Cliff Street headquarters — the old Bushworks building — promises to keep warm this winter with the daily whirring of saw blades, drill bits buzzing and nonstop tap-tap-tap hammering.
The woodworking trio’s currently in the midst of making a big built-in library for a Livermore Street home. Next on the docket: a copious number of cutting boards for Christmas gifts, pencil holders for a nearby business, a top-to-bottom bathroom remodel, a big kitchen island and on and on.
Villagers Ike Pouliot and Lilli and Eric Rudolf stand in Fernature’s woodshop on Cliff Street. Behind the trio is a growing shelving unit made of cherry, set to be installed at a Livermore Street home upon its completion. (Photo by Reilly Dixon)
Essentially, the Fernature trio will take on any project if it strikes their fancy and aligns with what they can make — anything from restoring grandpa’s old cabinet to building bases for yurts, erecting a hobbit-styled garden gate to making a modernist living room chair.
Like a lot of hobbies-turned-businesses, Fernature emerged from the early and isolating days of the COVID-19 pandemic, when the Rudolfs and Pouliot passed a lot of time with their own woodworking projects. On a lark, they pooled their tools to see what they could do.
“It was kind of the perfect time,” Pouliot said. “We were stuck doing nothing, and suddenly, we had a job.”
Each brings a distinct skillset to the workbench. Eric Rudolf hails from an engineering background; his sister’s been renovating homes and doing contracting work for the last eight years; and Pouliot was once a professional tree trimmer and sawyer.
They said that “trifecta of backgrounds” was in full force for some recent jobs.
First, there was a remodeling job in neighboring Clifton — a “down-to-the-stud renovation,” Eric Rudolf said, which required each repertoire. The homeowner wanted to use a tree that had fallen on her property to make new kitchen cabinets and bathroom vanities. The Fernature folks had to work around plumbing and tiling, and near the end of the project, laid trim around the whole house and built a new portico leading into the home.
The trio’s wits were really tested when Glen Helen tapped them to build a few bridges on the Talus Trail in 2024. Fernature was tasked with installing walkways to span the ever-eroding gullies along the trail caused by the village’s stormwater runoff. The job site was deep in the woods — not the easiest place to haul building materials .
“So we built a minecart,” laughed Pouliot.
The elder Rudolf’s engineering brain conceived of a hydraulic winch elevator on tracks that allowed the crew to lower concrete and long boards of western red cedar down a steep hillside along Grinnell Road into the Glen.
Maybe it’s their complementary skills that render these big jobs manageable or, maybe, it’s a family thing. Eric and Lilli have been making bits and bobs in their dad’s workshop since they were kids, and Pouliot and Lilli are engaged.
“Sure there are some complications,” Lilli Rudolf laughed. “It’s difficult not to take your work home. We have family dinners and are still talking about how to solve some problem.”
She continued: “But it does enable a lot of flexibility. We know what’s going on in each other’s lives.”
“Right,” Pouliot agreed. “There’s no calling your boss having to ask for time off because your son has a 103 degree fever.”
The family ties are tight. A few days before their interview with the News, the Fernature trio called on Dan Rudolf — Eric and Lilli’s father — to help them install exit signs at the shop. And before that, they gifted their sister Melanie a bespoke wooden arbor for her wedding.
Ike Pouliot in front of Fernature’s wood curing behind the woodshop. (Photo by Reilly Dixon)
Aesthetically, Fernature’s furniture is simple. Surfaces are unadorned and unpainted. Designs feature clean, minimalist geometry.
In a way, these stylistic preferences stem from a shared reverence for wood — specifically the way the material speaks its possible forms into existence, provided a skilled woodworker is able to listen.
“We let the wood speak for itself,” Lilli Rudolf said.
Sometimes that means leaving burls exposed or using a gnarled knot as a cabinet handle.
“This is not cookie-cutter work,” Eric Rudolf stressed. “We take the most interesting aspects of the material and highlight it.”
Though the three wouldn’t rebuke anyone for having IKEA or any other commercially made furniture, they see their work as a cut above — practical and attractive works that can stand the test of time.
Lilli Rudoolf in front of some of the shop’s hand tools. (Photo by Reilly Dixon)
“Most fast furniture is made out of particle board — wood dust that’s been glued together and pressed together with epoxy,” Eric Rudolf said. “If it gets wet in the slightest, it’ll swell and flake apart and chip. You can’t repair that, only replace it.”
Pouliot put a sharper point on it: “When you buy IKEA furniture you probably helped some private equity firm. When you buy ours, you help us feed our dogs or pay our bills — you’re helping individuals.”
Rudolf continued: “But with that stuff, the IKEA stuff, there’s no patina, no story. For most of it, it either looks new or if not, time to throw it away. But tables like ours will exist until someone sets fire to it. It’ll get dings, scratches and be in someone’s home for 100 years, and after it all, there’ll be a whole story written on it.”
That emphasis on durability — on objects having a life of their own, well beyond their mass-produced contemporaries — is an ethos that the Fernature trio is soon taking into a new medium: teaching. They want to pass along what they know to those who’d like to keep the craft alive.
The three said they have every intention of staging woodworking classes from their shop this winter.
“There’s a large barrier to woodworking,” Lilli Rudolf said. “Forget the large machines. Even hand tools like a plane and chisel can put you out around $400 just to get started. So, we wondered if we could help people figure out if they want to get into the hobby — to try it out.”
Ideally, the three said the in-shop sessions would be for adults only and for a limited number of folks; they’d start with hand tools and potential goals of making simple boxes or cutting boards. Eventually, if some people show sustained interest, the classes could graduate to using machines and making larger, more complicated objects like a chair or table.
That latter scenario is a ways away, the three admitted; having people come into the shop to use their machines is a considerable liability.
“It turns out a lot of woodworking is inherently unsafe,” Pouliot said. “You’re around a lot of machines trying to remove your fingers.”
The Rudolfs and Pouliot have plenty of time to pin down the details of these classes.
Like their chairs, boards, bridges, arbors and all the rest, Fernature as a company is here to last, the three owners said. The business will likely change and morph as the seasons come and go, but as Eric Rudolf suggested, that’s par for their medium.
“Wood moves over time,” he said. “Every cut releases a stressor. So, with our wood we have to think what it could be doing in five years. How could it swell or twist? And curing lumber takes time — a year for every inch of thickness. We have to plan ahead and think about the future.”
Perhaps keeping a small-town woodshop up and running for years to come abides by a similar approach.
For more on Fernature, go to http://www.fernature.net or call 937-973-3814. The shop’s showroom — located at 114 Cliff St. — is open by appointment only.
The Yellow Springs News encourages respectful discussion of this article.
You must login to post a comment.
Don't have a login? Register for a free YSNews.com account.
No comments yet for this article.