Woodworker accomplishes beautiful complexity with salvaged material
Randy Hintz went from making items for family and friends to being carried by the region’s most well-known craft galleries.
Photo by Rachel Pressley
Craftmaking is often a collaborative endeavor, as Asheville woodworker Randy Hintz can testify. Twenty-five years ago, while he and his wife Sue were establishing Salvaterra Pottery and Randy was working as an engineer (he’s now retired), Hintz began crafting display structures and booths for Sue’s gallery shows and craft fairs. “I began to realize my passion for the craft [of woodworking],” Hintz says. “Most of my learning came by trial and error … lots of error.”
Soon Hintz was making items for the pure pleasure of doing so, but “the more I did, the more I wanted to do,” he recalls. “I became obsessed.” While these early efforts at crafting wood into practical or decorative ware mostly benefited friends and family members who received them as gifts, Sue Hintz recognized the quality of her husband’s work and suggested he start marketing and selling his own items. To start the ball rolling, she took several examples to Asheville’s New Morning Gallery, which carries her pottery line. In short order, the gallery began carrying Hintz’s work as well, followed by about a dozen other venues. A company, Refined Rustic Woodworks, was formed, a website launched, and Hintz’s innate talent with wood was brought to a coast-to-coast audience.
Photo by Rachel Pressley
Part of Hintz’s success is an eye for original designs that serve a practical as well as decorative function. His lamps, which feature glazed ceramic tiling made by his wife, are crafted of cherry, walnut, or oak —choices Hintz favors for his more formal pieces. Even more popular are his uniquely shaped beer flights — appropriate for “Beer City USA” and often crafted of less uniformly structured woods, like ambrosia maple.
“Ambrosia maple has some beautiful color variations. I often seek out wood materials with character — knots, checks, cracks, and coloration make each piece unique,” he says. Hintz even emphasizes such markings by filling them in with pigmented epoxy or otherwise drawing attention to anomalies that, in other hands, might cause a piece of wood to be rejected. A line of wine and sake flights have joined their brew cousins, the sake flights sold with cups handmade by Sue.
Much of Hintz’s wood is sustainably gathered from lumber-mill scraps and manufacturing leftovers — remarkable given the complexity of Hintz’s work. One commissioned custom desk clock featured a ceramic face created by Sue and a small storage drawer beneath.
Photo by Rachel Pressley
In addition to the fine details, the challenge here was “in the sequential assembly — ensur[ing] the function of the clock mechanism while hiding the electrical cord inside the piece — it was a lot of tight spaces,” he recalls.
Randy Hintz, Refined Rustic Woodworks, Weaverville, 828-707-8388, refinedrusticwood.com. Hintz’s work is sold regionally at New Morning Gallery (7 Boston Way, Biltmore Village, newmorninggallerync.com); Kress Emporium (19 Patton Ave., downtown Asheville, thekressemporium.com); Carolina Mountain Artist Guild (444 North Main St., Hendersonville); Green Hill Gallery (34 North Main St., Waynesville); Salvaterra Pottery (30 Cole Road, Weaverville, salvaterrapottery.com); Sanctuary of Stuff (440 Weaverville Road, Asheville, sanctuaryofstuff.com), and Sweetgrass Artisan Mercantile (23 Crimson Laurel Way, Bakersville, sweetgrassartisanmercantile.com).