The Caning Shoppe

I really liked the job done. I had three pieces repaired including 2 cane seats and one repair of an old mahogany night table that matches a really nice old set, and that was a complete bear to re-​glue (I tried it myself initially but it fell apart again). The Caning Shoppe did a great job bringing it back to life and I am thrilled with the seats too. Well worth any wait. They are backed up because they are good at what they do and within reason on price. Owners were very pleasant too.

I went to the Caning Shoppe because my great-grandmother’s caned rocking chair needed a new seat. And my girlfriend had her bench fixed here and they did a good job, and it took about 2 weeks. I spoke to two different employees at 2 different visits to the store and they said their lead time was about 5 – 6 weeks but it would be done for Christmas. I was fine with waiting if it was going to be done well and it was only going to cost me $ 110. I dropped it off on Oct 31^st, I called on December 18^th to find out if my chair was done, and the owner got on the phone and told me they hadn’t even touched it. When he heard that I was upset he offered to put several people on it and that it would be done in 3 days. I was a little taken aback by the fact that they had my chair sitting in their shop for 6 weeks and it actually only takes 3 days to install a new caned seat and to stain it to match the other caning. I picked up the chair and the caning part is nice, there are spots where it is not stained and it needs another coat or two of polyurethane. The seat is very rough with little pieces of wood /​caning sticking up on the seat. So I have to fix a chair that I waited 6 weeks for and had to have an unpleasant conversation with an shop owner who really didn’t see why I might be upset. Why doesn’t this shop just take reservations for people to drop off their items closer to the time they will actually work on it? And set your clients expectations so there isn’t an upset customer. All in all I wouldn’t recommend this shop. Turns out there are other caning shops out there and next time I will use someone else.

We referred a customer here for recaning of a chair seat. That chair is now in our shop to have several sharp sticking-​out bits of cane fixed. They must not have checked the sheet of pre-​woven cane for flaws before installing it on the chair, because just in that small seat area there are at least five significant sharp snags. We will not be sending customers here in the future.

Got a really nice shoji-​style lamp here. These are all hand-​crafted wood/​cane work pieces, as my friend Ger put it, they have a lot of character. Definitely things here are a lot more interesting than if you just got something at Target or whatever. It’s probably a touch too expensive to outfit your *entire* house with pieces from here but a few things here or there would be a nice touch.
They have both western caned/​wicker chairs and Japanese-​esque shoji and bamboo styles here, in some cases these styles are mixed/​hybridized in decorative screenings. Very interesting.
Pieces in here would go well in most New England homes (not just «modern» styles), since they’re warm woods and are a good complement to the styles in most houses in the area.