Choosing an Amish dining table, Charleston SC homeowners face four decisions in a fairly set order: which hardwood, which finish, what size and shape, and what happens the day it is delivered. This guide walks through all four the way a furniture specialist at Charleston Amish Furniture would walk through them with you at the showroom on Sam Rittenberg Boulevard.
What an Amish Dining Table in Charleston, SC Really Means
Nearly every dining table we sell is built after you order it. The order goes to an Amish family workshop in Ohio, Pennsylvania or Indiana — a small shop where a few woodworkers carry a piece through from rough lumber to final coat, rather than a line where one person drills one hole all day. We visit these shops, which is why we can tell you whose workshop is building your table: Arista Wood in Sugarcreek, Ohio, the Ohio Furniture Guild in Millersburg, Ohio, Troyer Design Company, and others we have worked with for years.
These are serious businesses with serious equipment. The shops operate off the public electrical grid, so their saws, sanders and clamping presses run on diesel, compressed air and hydraulic power. The craft shows up in the joinery and the finish: mortise-and-tenon frames, dovetailed drawer boxes in the matching sideboard, and tops built so the wood can move with the seasons instead of splitting.
Not everything on our floor is Amish-built, and we would rather say so plainly. Upholstery and accent lines come from makers chosen for that work: Smith Brothers of Berne, Indiana, building since 1926; Rowe of Salem, Virginia, since 1946; Natuzzi from Italy; Uttermost for lamps and mirrors; and LuxCraft for outdoor poly lumber. If you want the longer version of how the dining pieces themselves are made, our craft page goes into the construction, and a look inside an Amish family workshop follows a piece from board to finish.
Decision One: Which Hardwood
Nine hardwoods are available, including live edge slabs and reclaimed barnwood. The useful question is not which wood is best, but which one suits your house and the people who are going to eat at it.
- White and red oak. Hard, open-grained and forgiving of daily life. Quarter-sawn white oak shows the ray fleck that Mission and Craftsman tables are known for.
- Cherry. Fine-grained and smooth, and it darkens as it meets light, so a cherry table is visibly richer a year in than the day it arrived.
- Walnut. Deep brown without any stain at all, a little softer than oak, and the usual choice for live edge tops.
- Maple. Pale and tight-grained. It takes paint and light finishes cleanly, which is why painted bases are so often maple.
- Hickory. One of the hardest domestic hardwoods, with dramatic color swings from board to board. Families with young children often land here or on oak.
When woodworkers compare hardness they cite the Janka test, which measures the force needed to press a steel ball halfway into a board. It is a fair shorthand for how easily a top dents, though the finish and the construction matter just as much in a real dining room. For a species-by-species comparison, which wood holds up best in Lowcountry humidity goes deeper, and you can see the same woods finished and styled across our dining collections.
Decision Two: Finish, Color and Sheen
More than 180 finishes sit on the rack, and when none of them is right we can match a color you bring in: a cabinet door, a flooring sample, a paint chip off the dining room wall.
Two things set the final look. The stain decides the color, and the sheen decides how the room reads. A satin topcoat hides fingerprints and softens glare; a higher sheen throws light and makes the grain pop. Ask for sample boards in the species you are considering and take them home. Lowcountry light is strong and it moves — morning sun through a Mount Pleasant window and four o’clock glare off the marsh will pull two different colors out of the same board.
A painted base under a stained top is a common pairing: soft white, sage or slate under walnut or oak, which keeps a long table from feeling heavy in a smaller room. At the other end of the range, this live edge dining room scene shows what a slab top and a sculptural base look like once they are finished. The full set of stains, paints and sheens is on the finishes page.
Decision Three: Size, Shape and How Many People Really Fit
Measure the room before you fall for a table. Most of the regret we hear about dining furniture is about size, not style. A few working figures to carry with you:
- Allow roughly 24 inches of table edge per seated person, and more if your chairs have arms.
- Leave at least 36 inches between the table edge and the nearest wall or sideboard, and closer to 42 inches where people have to walk behind seated chairs.
- A round or square top suits a tight, square-ish dining room; a long rectangle suits an open plan where the table anchors one end of the space.
- A trestle or pedestal base frees up the corners for legs; four posts give you something solid to clamp a high chair to.
Extension leaves are the part people underestimate. Decide now whether the table lives at its everyday length and grows for holidays, or sits full-size year round. Because the piece is built to order, the dimensions are yours to set — 38 inches wide instead of 42, 96 inches long for the Thanksgiving crowd, counter height instead of standard, a leg inset that clears your bench. How customization works covers the choices that get settled on paper before anything is cut.
Decision Four: Base, Edge, Chairs and Hardware
Once wood, finish and size are set, the smaller choices are what make a table look like it was drawn for your house. The edge profile is the one people notice without knowing why: an eased square edge reads modern, a beveled or rounded edge reads traditional, and a live edge keeps the shape of the tree. The base follows the same logic — trestle, single or double pedestal, turned legs, or a steel frame under a slab.
Chairs are their own decision, and they do not have to match the table exactly. Many of our dining chairs come from FN Chairs in LaGrange, Indiana; you can read about the chair shop in LaGrange and how its frames are built. Mixing six side chairs with two upholstered hosts, or swapping one long side for a bench, is routine. If you want fabric or leather seats, there are more than 2,300 fabrics and leathers to choose from, and choosing fabric and frame explains how that side of the showroom works.
Hardware matters most on the pieces that stand beside the table. A matching sideboard, hutch or server can be specified from more than 1,000 hardware styles, so the pulls on your dining storage can echo the kitchen you already have rather than fight it.
A Saturday Afternoon With a Furniture Specialist
All of this is easier sitting down with someone who does it every day. Our showroom at 1750 Sam Rittenberg Boulevard in West Ashley runs 35,000 square feet, open Monday through Saturday from 10am to 6pm and closed Sunday. Design help is complimentary, either on the floor or at your house, with your own light and your own floors in front of us.
A first visit usually goes in the same order as this guide: walk the dining floor, put hands on three or four woods, narrow the finish with sample boards, then measure. You leave with a written specification — species, finish, dimensions, base, edge, hardware, chair count — and a build time for that order. Our team carries more than 100 combined years in home furnishings, which mostly shows up as someone telling you a 108-inch table will not work in your room before you order one.
There is no pressure to decide the same afternoon; this is a considered purchase and we treat it that way. If you would like to know what to expect before you come in, what to bring on a first showroom visit covers the practical side, and more than 170 positive reviews across Google, Facebook and Yelp are collected on our reviews page.
Built to Order, or Off the Floor
Both are real options, and neither is the better one in the abstract. A floor piece is already finished, already here, and already the size it is — which is the right answer when a closing date is coming, when a rental needs furnishing, or when the table you walked past happens to be exactly right.
Built to order is the right answer when the room has an odd shape, when you need a width or a height that is not standard, when the finish has to meet an existing floor, or when you want a wood the floor model does not come in. It takes longer, and the build time is quoted for your specific order rather than promised in advance. Built to order or off the floor compares the two once you are actually living with the piece.
Delivery Day: What White-Glove Actually Includes
A dining table is heavy, awkward and finished on every visible surface, so the last hundred feet matter. Your table is inspected before it ships, carried into the room you want it in rather than left in the driveway, and assembled and set up by our white-glove team. We deliver across the Lowcountry, from downtown Charleston to Mount Pleasant, Summerville, Folly Beach and the islands.
Two things are worth doing before that day. Measure the path, not just the room: front door width, the turn at the bottom of a staircase, the porch steps on an Old Village house, the elevator in a downtown building. And clear the route, including the rug you want the table to sit on. Delivery is scheduled per order rather than promised at the time of sale, and your specialist confirms the window with you. What happens on delivery day walks through the visit step by step.
Living With Solid Wood in Lowcountry Humidity
Solid wood is not fragile, but it is alive to its surroundings. It takes on moisture in a humid August and gives it back in a dry, heated January, and a table built with that movement in mind handles the swing quietly. What you can do is keep the swing moderate and the surface protected:
- Use coasters and placemats, and put something heat-resistant under anything that comes straight off the stove.
- Wipe spills promptly rather than letting them stand, and skip harsh or abrasive cleaners on a finished top.
- Keep the table out of long hours of direct sun, which lightens or deepens a finish unevenly over time. Move a centerpiece or runner now and then so the top ages evenly underneath it.
- Do not park a table directly over a floor vent or right against a hard-running air conditioning register.
- Store extension leaves flat and indoors, in conditioned space, not in a garage or an attic.
Our furniture care guidance has the full routine, and keeping a solid wood piece steady through a Lowcountry year goes month by month. For the things nobody plans for, we offer Guardsman protection plans; the most popular five-year plan covers up to $30,000 of furniture.
How Pricing and Payment Work
We do not price furniture online, and that is not a sales tactic. No two built-to-order tables are the same piece: species, dimensions, base, edge, finish and chair count all move the number, so a price quoted against a photograph would be wrong as often as it was right. Your specialist prices the written specification you leave with, and that quote holds for that specification.
Special financing is available with approved credit through our store credit card, issued by Wells Fargo Bank, N.A. The offers available change over time, so rather than publish terms that may be out of date by the time you read them, a specialist will explain the current options in the showroom. You can read how the program works on our financing page.
Where to Start
Start with the room, not the catalog. Bring three measurements — the room, the open floor around where the table will sit, and the narrowest doorway on the way in — plus a photo of the space and anything the finish has to live with: a floor sample, a cabinet door, a paint chip. An hour on the floor with those in hand gets you most of the way to a specification.
The showroom is at 1750 Sam Rittenberg Boulevard in West Ashley, open Monday through Saturday, 10am to 6pm. Call (843) 225-2513 with a question, or send us a message through the contact page and tell us what room you are furnishing. Built once. Kept for good.
Frequently asked questions
Where can I find Amish-made furniture in Charleston, South Carolina?
Charleston Amish Furniture is at 1750 Sam Rittenberg Boulevard in West Ashley, with 35,000 square feet of showroom floor, open Monday through Saturday from 10am to 6pm and closed Sunday. The dining, bedroom and office pieces are built to order in Amish family workshops in Ohio, Pennsylvania and Indiana. Upholstery and accent lines on the floor come from other makers, including Smith Brothers, Rowe, Natuzzi, Uttermost and LuxCraft.
How much does an Amish dining table cost?
Nothing is priced online, because no two built-to-order tables are the same piece. The wood species, dimensions, base, edge profile, finish and number of chairs all change the figure, so a price attached to a photograph would be misleading. A furniture specialist prices the written specification you build in the showroom, so the quote is for your table rather than a generic one.
Can you buy furniture directly from the Amish?
Some Amish workshops do sell at their own shops. Most, though, are small operations in Ohio, Pennsylvania and Indiana with no showroom, no freight network and no practical way to handle a custom order placed from another state. Buying through a store that already works with those shops means the specification, the finish match, the inspection and the delivery are handled for you, and someone local is accountable if something is not right.
Is Amish furniture worth the money?
That depends on how long you intend to keep it. Solid hardwood built with mortise-and-tenon joinery and dovetailed drawers costs more up front than a veneered piece, is meant to outlast several of them, and can be refinished decades later rather than replaced. If you are furnishing a short-term rental or expect to change styles in a few years, the math is different, and we will say so.
How long does a built-to-order dining table take?
Build time is quoted per order rather than published, because it depends on the workshop, the wood, the finish and what else is in that shop’s queue. Your specialist gives you a build time in writing with your specification, and the delivery window is confirmed with you as the piece gets close. Floor pieces that are already finished and in stock go home far sooner.
