Recent News & Posts

I often look back and fondly remember the gift that started my lifelong passion for fine wood working. My wife Susan surprised me with a set of professional wood carving chisels and gouges on our first Christmas together. I had just graduated from college with a degree in business management. I believed that was the prudent course for a young married man to follow but I do remember saying to her that day “these tools will change our lives.” The rest, as they say, is history.

My first attempt at using the tools was quite a challenge. My mom needed a ball and claw leg carved to repair an antique pie crust pedestal table. As it turned out I took to woodcarving like a duck takes to water. My basement workshop was soon filled with restoration projects for local antique dealers. Bed posts fascinated me the most. Each post had to be hand turned and then carefully carved to match the original antique. Complete four poster beds in queen and king sizes soon became the mainstay of my business as most antique rope beds were too small for today’s needs.

Since then and for over 30 years, it has been my good fortune to be surrounded by a spectacular team of craftsmen and women. Together we have restored antiques and architectural elements for dealers, builders and architects. We’ve built traditional and custom furniture for the most discriminating interior designers. We’ll often design and customize machinery and tools to bring a designer’s concept to fruition.

Despite my business degree, I rely on the front-end of the business to take care of what I now consider the hard stuff. The office staff takes great pride in establishing enduring relationships with an impressive list of creative designers and their high-profile clients. As a team, we know our efforts have produced heirlooms that will be cherished for generations.

Our new website features eight collections of classic and custom beds. In addition to our traditional finishes in warm wood tones, we have had great fun with paint finishes in soft, bold, and romantic colors…colors inspired by designer fabrics. We are pleased to be collaborating with Meg Roberts Design on these new finishes. Meg is a longtime family friend with a passion for color, a keen eye for detail and an accomplished artist with clients worldwide.

We are also proud to introduce our exacting line of Salesman’s Samples…an early 20^th Century concept that made sense to revisit this Century to promote the charm and character of four-poster beds.

We welcome your thoughts and ideas about our new website and hope to work with you soon.

I am proud to be the developer of the new website and part of the Stephen  Plaud team!  Over 10 years ago I was approached by Spencer Plaud and asked to help build their web presence, and we did that together.  For my efforts, a new bed was personally installed by their crew and it is a piece of art.  Here we are today with a new, re-written website built on state-of-the-art front and back-end frameworks - still, the quality of the website pales in comparison to their product.

I want to take a moment to give you my thoughts on Stephen Plaud and their products.  Although I work closely with them, I am still an outsider so these statements are pure opinion.  First and foremost, calling the items they produce, 'products', somehow seems degrading - in actuality they build Heirlooms and I will further say that they are all museum quality.  Have you ever thought, "gee, they sure don't build things' like they used to!"?  Well, Stephen Plaud does just that - they design Heirlooms that will be providing beauty and pleasure for generations.  The attention to detail, the construction, the finish are all impecabble.

We will continue to add to this new site.  The additions will be posts, products and new features and functionalities!  Please, take a moment to 

Ok - now the technical stuff (my favorite part!)

This website was developed on CakePHP which allowed for very quick, dry and consice coding.  Many community plug-ins were used and I will be writing a seperate post about those later.  The front-end of this website was built on Twitter Bootstrap and Font-Awesome.  All three of these packages allow for a shortened development time and a better-looking more well controlled user interface.

The site is tightly integrated with the most popular social networks and you will see those links in header and footer of all pages throughout the site.  We have implemented "Live Chat" which allows people browsing the website to chat with the Stephen Plaud staff and get all questions answered.  The administrative users of the site are shown statistical information from Google Webmasters, Google Analytics and Bing in real-time.

If anyone has any questions please take advantage of the Live Chat (found at the top of every page).  If you have technical questions regarding this site you can email the webmasters at webmaster@stephenplaud.com.  If you have any questions regarding the development of this site or the technologies, you may contact me at al@pontefamily.us or visit my sandbox and blog site.

If you have not already done so, show your support  Like us on Facebook and our other social network pages at the top and bottom of every page on the site!

I would like to take this opportunity to share with you some of the features we have added to our new site. Besides the fresh new look, we have introduced a search engine allowing users to find specific products. We now have the ability to add products, collections, news and posts with ease, allowing us to keep our site fresh with new bed and furniture designs as they are produced! So check back often!

Here at Stephen Plaud Inc., we pride ourselves on our heirloom quality custom beds but that is not all we do. As you can see in our portfolio, we are willing to tackle even the most complex jobs providing our customers with the highest quality products.

Features soon to come:

• Designer Referral Program
• Nightstands and Table Collections

Last but not least, a big thank you to Alberto Ponte for building our new website. Thanks to Mr. Ponte's intuitive input and exceptional skills we are confident the new Stephen Plaud site will be a powerful sales tool for Interior Designers worldwide. Mr. Ponte was a pleasure to work with and we look forward to working with him again.