On a swampy slice of land saddled close to Kenilworth subdivision is a workshop planted in a muddy oasis and hidden smack in the middle of prime Baton Rouge suburbia. The calm of the crisp, wooded breeze breathing in and out of the open-air shop soothes the violent buzz of a saw charging through cypress.
These are the first cries of birth. Custom tables and chests and beds begin life here.
The man behind the saw is Revival Supply Co. owner Jacob Triche, who constructs each piece of furniture from reclaimed wood—mostly salvaged cypress he buys from two suppliers in north Baton Rouge, though he scores some on Craigslist every now and then.
“I like to take things people thought were dead and bring them back to life,” Triche says. “I use one of the most expensive materials, but that’s because you can’t manufacture the character of old cypress with a new piece of wood.”
Valerie Strahle, a newlywed and full-time nanny in Baton Rouge, owns several of Triche’s pieces, including a large kitchen table made of vintage cypress. “My husband and I hadn’t even bought the house yet, but I kept calling Jacob with ideas [for furniture]. He really let us join in the creative process, and that allowed us to show our personalities. The furniture we saw in stores was more bland, and it all looked the same.”
Triche is a hiker and camper, an outdoorsman who prefers practicing his craft anywhere that a little bit of wild can creep in. His texture-rich furniture reflects a massive respect for nature, and he believes the process of its creation should too. This aesthetic has attracted many buyers from the local artistic community.
“He is a perfectionist like I am,” says Baton Rouge-based photographer Aaron Hogan, who hired Triche to install a wood-paneled wall in his home. “[The wall he made] looks as if it could have been installed 50 years ago instead of last month. He’s also a great listener, which is incredibly important for an artist.”
Triche ships his furniture across the country. Adam Boehler is the CEO of a health care services company in Newport, Calif. He and his wife were looking for a farmhouse-inspired table that was artful, but substantial enough to withstand any barrage from their three young children.
“It’s not just rustic,” Boehler says of Triche’s work. “There’s really another dynamic with Jacob’s unique use of color.”
Triche is spending much of this spring on a new partnership that will develop a furniture-making outpost in San Diego to better meet the demands of West Coast clients like Boehler.
“I think his aesthetic will do well in California,” Boehler says. “People here, in beach communities, especially, are looking for that style.”
While Triche’s furniture business grows, his muse is veering toward a series of outdoors innovations he hopes to patent and manufacture by the end of the year. A handful of his concepts are in the prototype stage.
“I love what I do,” the 30-year-old Baton Rougean says, looking back to his workshop as he walks down a dirt slope toward an algae-blanketed pond, “but to be honest, I’m getting a little bored with it.”
Triche has long alleviated his doldrums with bursts of creative expression and plenty of left-brain tinkering. As a child, he was always taking apart his toy cars and robots and rearranging the pieces into new beasts of motion, exploration or combat.
“If I’m not inspired, if I’m stuck in a routine, I get bored, and I’ll just shut down,” Triche says. “I need to be growing and changing and creating. I like to improve on things constantly.”
Triche reaches the bottom of the hill and unfolds what looks like a plastic campaign sign that would stand in a yard. What begins as little more than two flat feet of the stuff, only three inches thick, opens up into an 84-inch-long canoe. Triche hops in suddenly, as if river waters were rising to meet the swift row of his paddle. He’s created a boat that fits in a backpack.
“I envision hikers really going for it,” he says of the prototype two-man pack-and-float boat. “It’s strong, but so light.”
Nearby, a honey-brown obelisk sits at the water’s edge. It uses the same “flat pack” concept, only expanded to inhabitable proportions. The 96-square-foot flat pack house can be erected in four hours and packed flat in 45 minutes using only an 11mm wrench. Another prototype, it’s for sale on Triche’s Etsy site for $3,500.
He envisions this temporary housing populating hunting camps, but the even greater application may be its implementation during disaster relief.
“I probably spend more time thinking and planning than I do actually building,” Triche says of his creative process. Triche meditates on his projects in coffee shops, meeting creative friends to discuss his work and theirs, too, and while he’s constantly constructing his work in his mind, his sketches become more and more detailed over time until their final precision tells Triche it is time to go to work.
Over coffee, he pulls out another prototype. This one looks like a lightsaber and acts like a syringe. It’s his portable water filtration system, engineered using parts from a food injector, a hose, pipe fittings and other scraps, and it filters water in real time. Flip up the cap and drink straight from the device. It’s the type of gadget one might see evaluated on Shark Tank, though Triche knows he needs to go into manufacturing and register significant sales before appearing on the show.
Hoping to get him to that level is new partner D.J. Howard, a former LSU football punter with a master’s degree in business administration.
“We’ve been friends for a long time, but the reason we are going into business together is because I like the way his mind works,” Howard says. “He looks at problems and thinks of solutions so differently, in a way that’s inspiring.”
Howard is helping Triche find investors and plug into tradeshows and other avenues to promote his products.
Triche has come to the point of no return with his prototypes. He doesn’t want them to be prototypes for much longer. As Revival Supply Co. expands, he’s ready to double down on a wilder dream.
“I do need to focus on furniture to have income, but for the inventions, I’m in that moment where I can’t let it sit on the back burner,” Triche says. “It’s time to make that happen.” revivalsupply.co
