Ragsdale Home Furnishings

4352 Doncaster Ave.  Holt, Michigan  48842   (517) 579-8952

Hello, and welcome to our website.  We hope you find it functional, and our product line interesting and beautiful.  Ragsdale Home Furnishings is an old-style wood shop located in Lower Michigan.  Phillip Myer, principal artisan, specializes in the creation and reproduction of high quality mission lighting and tables.   

I always use a spline joint in all table tops, which is the way the original Limbert Company made them.  Splines help to reinforce the wood joints from inside, and prevent any warping that may occur through the years.  Our table tops are attached with figure 8’s or using a blind pin that lets the top float, and expand and contract with seasonal moisture changes, thus avoiding possible cracking with age.  If you purchase one of my items you may find that it increases in value with age, and I hand sign and date almost everything. 

Most of my pieces and especially the lamps are a lot of fun, especially if you are an arts and crafts fan.  All our pieces took hours to handcraft with attention to quality and detail.  focus in working with quarter sawn white oak, as it is selected for its resistance to warping, strength and durability.  Next to Hickory, White oak is the second hardest wood that is native to North America.   We can make pieces with other woods such as Cherry, Mahogany, or Maple, but we don’t normally carry those woods in stock.  We like to hear what our customers think about our pieces.  We frequently make custom pieces, and we are always creating different designs to add to our portfolio.   If you don't see what you are looking for here in this website, feel free to ask us about it.  there are many things we have done, but don't have pictures of everything.

Ragsdale uses environmentally friendly materials and processes. Our wood is drawn from private sustainable managed forests here and throughout the Midwest.  Our Mica is mined near Asheville NC, and is a naturally occurring mineral. Our art glass is all manufactured in the US, and our electrical parts are all purchased from US companies.

Special thanks to the following organizations for helping us wherever possible.  The Brook Lodge, and Michigan State University, for providing the backgrounds in may of our photographs.  W.K. Kellogg Manor, for displaying all the great period furniture, and the Michigan State University Biological Station at Kellogg Forest for being such a wonderful place to learn the art and science of Forestry. 

And last but not least, I would like to thank Les Yoder, and Lloyd Miller,  and the Amish Community of Leonodis.  Anyone who get his friends help him build an old fashioned oak beamed barn with awesome skylights,  then  buy a shop full of new Delta industrial woodworking equipment, rip the motors out of them and leave them with us fancy people.  Then use a series of drive shafts, gears, belts, pulleys, and clutches to engineer the whole thing so that the saw blades sanding belts, planer blades, and drill press chucks all spin at the correct speeds/RPMs’ off of a crank shaft that runs through the barns 3 foot thick cement foundation.  Then attach the whole shop crankshaft that runs out the foundation of the barn to a merry-go-round that you hitch horses to…Well you are worthy of a lot of respect…us fancy people have a lot to learn about what the term “Green” really means.