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Making music in the Shenandoah Valley
Virginia Business
January 2005
Who
said craftsmanship was dead? At Taylor and Boody Organbuilders
in Staunton, employees still build by hand every component
of elaborate pipe organs. They make the keys, bellows
and playing action, cast and hammer the metal used for
the pipes, carve the wooden casework and test the final
instrument for performance. “We follow very strictly
this Old World approach,” explains co-owner John
Boody. “Everything by hand, everything made in
our own workshop. That’s what people want.”
Recent
clients include Yale University, which contracted to
build a pipe organ for its Marquand Chapel, and the
Old Salem Moravian Community in Winston-Salem, N.C.,
which has relied on the company to restore several historic
Tannenberg organs. Taylor and Boody’s work can
also be seen in St. Margaret’s School in Tokyo;
the Harvard Business School Chapel; the Oberlin Conservatory
in Ohio; the Lee Chapel at Washington and Lee University;
and The College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Mass.
Not surprisingly, Boody and co-owner George Taylor equate
business performance with quality. The partners like
to have a hand in all aspects of the business. As a
result, they are content to produce just seven or eight
organs each year.
For the first time since starting the business in the
late 1970s, Taylor and Boody are expanding their facility,
long housed in a former brick schoolhouse. The 5,000-square-foot
addition will enable the company, which has gross revenues
of nearly $1 million, to separate operations and move
materials more efficiently.
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Business - January 2005 |
