  (Above) Lynn Peer at work on another of his one-of-a-kind birdhouses. (Top) Peer’s birdhouses are made of weathered wood and various antique and found accessories. |
his past Christmas season, Lynn Peer
laughed easily and often as he talked about his birdhouses. His mood was very
different in 1997 when he was just struggling out of a five-year descent into
drinking and near-despair after losing his long-time job as a retail store
designer at the now-defunct Joseph Horn Co.
“I had been there 30 years and I was one of the last to lose my job,” says the Pittsburgh-area resident. “Younger guys were the first to go and I would try to counsel them about their future. When it finally happened to me, I couldn’t seem to help myself.”
Peer was barely out of rehab when his wife suggested a woodworking project to keep him busy. “When he came out in September, I was afraid he would just sit around again,” says Patricia Peer. “I thought of the idea of a Christmas gift for my son’s fiancé because she likes birdhouses. Her name is Angela and now we call her our angel –- it’s a miracle, actually.”
Peer says in the 39 years of their marriage he had never built anything, but the couple collected antiques and he had a “bunch of junk” in the basement. The artist calls his crafts business “Feather Beds/Fowl Dwellings” partly as a play-on-words describing the unique birdhouses he first created out of the junk in his basement. “They’re old, rusty kind of birdhouses,” Peer says with a laugh, “as in ‘foul.’”
In addition to delighting his future daughter-in-law, the first birdhouse astonished Peer by getting high praise from family and friends who wanted him to make more. “I had a friend with a folk art shop in Ligonier, Pa., and I decided to get her professional opinion,” Peer says. “I thought, ‘if she says it’s just cute, I’ll forget about selling them and just do this as a hobby.’”
The friend, Becky Smith of The Wooden Bobbin, told Peer she could easily sell the three-foot-high birdhouse he showed her for $350. “Then I made one that Gallery G in Ligonier used on their porch as a showpiece in the Birdhouse Festival on Memorial Day weekend,” Peer says. “That one was eight-foot tall and sold for $800.”
Today Peer’s architectural wonders range in price from $55 wholesale for the 14-inch ones to the “most expensive” 10-foot one that he wholesales for $1,700.
“They are really birdhouse sculptures and can be used inside, also,” Peer says. “When they are installed outside, the weather affects them and the wood and the metal fixtures change and people have to accept that.”
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After he started making birdhouses full time, Peer struck a deal with a man who had built rustic furniture for his home. “Reid Crosby has five barns where he reclaims wood for his business,” says Peer. “He trailers wood to me that he can’t use and that’s what I use for the birdhouses. The screws and glue are the only new things in my work.”
Each birdhouse is made of the weathered wood and embellished with Victorian bric-a-brac from furniture and similar detail from houses, old farm, garden and athletic equipment, and doorknobs and other antique fixtures Peer finds at flea markets –– some requested by the buyers. “You name it, I’ve made birdhouses with it,” says Peer. “I made one with a motorcycle theme for a Harley Davidson dealer. I made one with piano parts for [concert pianist] Andre Watts and I made one as a gift for [cookware company owner] Sam Farber with antique [cooking] instruments.”
Peer says people order birdhouses that are “something like” what they see at his shows. “Every birdhouse is one-of-a-kind and the works at the shows are only representative,” he explains. “I’ve had people send me a bunch of their grandmother’s or grandfather’s stuff and I use it to make their birdhouse.”
Today, every Feather Beds birdhouse is signed and numbered. “A customer will order one ‘like number whatever,’” explains Patricia Peer, “and we ask questions to see what they like about it or to put things on it that they like, such as a trumpet.”
Peer says “one built on an old shutter seems to be a popular piece,” but his newest version is a birdhouse mailbox that a customer at the American Craft Council show in Baltimore challenged him to make.
“He actually drove to Philadelphia to install it, as he had never done one before,” says Patricia Peer. “The customer was very happy.”
Peer never took a course in woodworking before or after starting his new career. “I’m afraid of ruining what I do,” he says. “I can’t even have an employee to help me because they would have to be able to see what’s in my head.”
Peer’s wife agrees he is a one-man show. “He won’t allow anyone to touch the birdhouses,” she says. “He even packs them himself to ship to the customers.”
Patricia Peer still works at her job as an account executive for a food company, but the couple uses her vacations to travel to shows. Peer took his work to the ACC show in 2001, and this year he went to George Little Management’s winter show in Atlanta. “We plan two wholesale shows a year,” Peer says, “and we don’t do the second one if I get enough orders at the first one.”
He also did the Market Square Traditional Wholesale Show in Fort Washington, Pa., for three years. At their very first wholesale show the couple took an amazing 400 orders. “We were obviously under-priced,” says Peer with another laugh. “Pricing is tricky and we didn’t know any better. I never did finish them all.”
Patricia Peer says the couple now keeps a clipboard list as customers come by their booth. “We tell them what month we will ship their order and write it on the list,” she says. “When we get to about 10 birdhouses, we start the next month. When we get to 12 months, we stop taking orders and tell them they have to wait until next year.”
 Peer’s customized birdhouses often include accessories like musical instruments. |
Peer aims to make seven to 10 birdhouses a month, depending on sizes. “We won’t take more than five orders from each shop, so retailers usually order several designs and different price points,” he says. “Right now, business is soft, but that doesn’t bother me. Enough is whatever the market will give me.”
When their time allows, Peer and his wife also deliver the completed orders themselves. “We like to do that so we can see where they go,” says Patricia Peer. “We had an eight-foot one built on an old treadle sewing machine base, and when the time came to deliver it we drove 14 hours straight to the customer in Springfield, Mo. The next day we drove 14 hours back to Pittsburgh.”
The Peers find this kind of adventure just another wonder of the crafts world. “We had so much fun doing that,” says Patricia Peer. “We’d like to do it more. We wore out our old van and recently bought a new cargo van for travel.”
Peer long ago outgrew his basement studio and moved into his garage. In 2002, that space had become too small as well. “We had a studio built in the backyard,” Peer says. “It was finished in time for Christmas so we could surprise our son and Angela when they came home for the holiday.”
Peer’s growing business also helped pay for an addition to his house, where he has installed a five-and-a-half-foot birdhouse, the first he made for himself. “This was the hardest one to do because it was for me and I wanted it just right,” he explains.
Peer says he can’t explain, however, where his creative visions begin or end. “I haven’t seen [birdhouses] like mine in all the shows I’ve been to,” he says. “They’ve been similar, but not with the embellishment I do. It’s an innate thing — I just know when to stop.”
But, even though his wife may retire from her job in a few more years, the 60-year-old artist doesn’t plan to stop making birdhouses anytime soon. “We live on faith,” Peer says. “I’ll do this as long as I can get the wood and lift a tool.”
-Mary E. Petzak is the editor of The Crafts Report.