The trade
began long
before the LLC.
The Porter family has been making cabinets longer than the State of Idaho has been making sense. Three generations of hands worked wood before Tom Porter hung the shingle on Kings Road in 1986. The lessons came down the way they always do — from a grandfather to a father, from a father to a son, in the language of dovetails and chisels and the particular smell of fresh maple shavings.
When Tom started the shop, it was him, one bench, and a borrowed thickness planer. He bid every job, drew every elevation, milled every face frame, and delivered every cabinet in his own pickup. The first kitchen he installed is still in service. The customer's son lives in the house now.
By the time Luke joined as a partner in 2009, the shop was four men on a working floor. By 2015 — the year Tom transitioned to semi-retirement and Luke took ownership — it had grown to eight. Today the bench is eighteen craftsmen deep, working ten thousand square feet, and shipping cabinetry into the most particular new-homes in the Valley.
But what comes off that bench is the same as what came off Tom's first bench in 1986. Solid hardwood face frame. Dovetailed drawer box. A finish put on by hand, by someone whose grandfather also put finishes on by hand.
