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Old
New
A woodworker determined
to settle in Maine
Profile Alex Hamilton
by Joshua Bodwell
Photography Irvin Serrano
I
had been trying to get here for a
long time,” says Alex Hamilton, his
arms folded across his chest as he
leans against the drafting table in his
sawdust-filled office at Tidewater Millwork
in Woolwich. His eyebrows rise and a smile
spreads across his face.
By “here,” Hamilton means Maine.
On the other side of his office door, saws
whine in the large Tidewater workshop, and
the air fills with the fine powder of mahogany.
A crew of five is busy turning out some of the
most impressive mouldings, turnings, doors,
and cabinetry in the state.
Bright-eyed, mellow, and sporting a playful
patch of beard, the 58-year-old Hamilton
was born and raised in Connecticut. After
discovering at a young age that he had a
talent for woodworking, Hamilton was
building fine interiors for yachts on the
Connecticut coast by his twenties. “After you
do that for a while, you start thinking you
can do anything,” he says of the complex
joinery required for the custom interiors.
Soon enough, Hamilton made the jump
“This thing is as heavy as a battleship,” laughs Alex Hamilton of Tidewater Millwork’s 1950s-vintage
cast-iron band saw (opposite). The colossal saw was completely rebuilt to Hamilton’s high standards
and is used primarily for cutting large curves, one of Tidewater’s calling cards. “It goes back to my
training in boatbuilding,” says Hamilton, “because working on boats is working with curves.”
Hamilton talks with employee John Oakes, whose system is running Tidewater’s CNC router and
computer-driven lathe (above). New finials for a Sagadahoc Preservation project in Bath line up
behind the original they will replace (top).
MH+D OCTOBER 08 33
from yachts to high-end residential and commercial work.
The next two and a half decades were, as they say, a blur.
Between 1974 and 1999, Hamilton grew his business to a crew of
twenty-five and completed woodworking projects at Carnegie Hall,
Rockefeller Center, and Yale University. His residential clients included
Mel Gibson, Ron Howard, Keith Richards, and George Soros.
But as the new millennium approached, Hamilton finally decided
to act on a long-standing desire and settle in Maine. He had visited the
state throughout his life, and his wife had summered on Isle au Haut.
Hamilton had also seen his rural Connecticut community eaten up by
shopping malls and sprawl. At 50 years old, he wanted a change.
Today, Tidewater Millwork operates out of several handsome
outbuildings peppered around Hamilton’s house on a twenty-five-acre
spread along the Kennebec River. Considering that only a small, round
“TM” sign at the end of the dirt driveway announces the business,
Tidewater is a surprising combination of Old World craftsmanship and
cutting-edge technology.
When Hamilton moved his business to Maine, he rebuilt his shop
from scratch and acquired all new tools and equipment in the process.
Among the drifts of sweet-smelling sawdust—which Hamilton trades
with a horse farmer down the lane for manure to fertilize his gardens—
are numerous saws and sanders, a vacuum press for making veneers,
and other pieces of hulking equipment. Hamilton
cut no corners when he set up the shop—in addition
to a seemingly endless supply of profiles for casings,
mouldings, chair rails, and other types of millwork,
Tidewater has the equipment on-site to make their
own moulding knives for custom profiles.
“Rather than subbing out bits and pieces and
possibly losing the continuity of quality, all of this
equipment allows us to have complete control on a
project from beginning to end,” says Hamilton.
In another shop across the driveway, a computerdriven lathe is turning out historically accurate finials
for Bath’s Sagadahoc Preservation; the same machine
can also turn out newels and balusters with amazing
speed and accuracy. At the other end of the small
room, the robotic arm on a CNC router cuts thirtytwo ornamental roof brackets out of two-inch-thick
slabs of mahogany from a digital rendering. After
explaining that one man runs the whole operation in
this room, Hamilton grins and nods as the machines
whirr.
Back outside and away from the noise of steel
blades, Hamilton boils his business philosophy down
to three “bests.”
“I’ve always tried to get the best equipment, the
best employees, and the best clients,” he says. “We
have the same high-tech equipment here as much
larger commercial shops—but without the highly
skilled, caring people who work here, none of it
would matter.”
Tidewater Millwork: tidewatermillwork.com, 207-443-8020
34 OCTOBER 08 MH+D
“
I’ve always tried
to get the best
equipment, the
best employees,
and the best
clients.”
Tidewater supplied massive amounts of
mahogany for the exterior of this Cape
Elizabeth home (opposite, top and below),
including hulking brackets and curved
components. As members of the Architectural
Woodwork Institute (AWI), Tidewater is used
to working closely with architects to execute
their vision.
“Pretty much this entire project was handled
in-house,” says Hamilton of this Woolwich
kitchen (opposite, bottom). A collaborative
design with the homeowner, the
kitchen features sycamore veneer
cabinetry that was pressed
right in the Tidewater
shop.
Profile Alex Hamilton
Even though Tidewater is relatively new
to Maine, the company has already built a
solid reputation. Their strong relationships
with some of the state’s most respected
builders speak for themselves: Boothbay
Home Builders, Cold Mountain Builders,
Fine Lines Construction, Knickerbocker
Group, Bruce Laukka, and Wright-Ryan
Construction.
With the morning quickly waning and a
backlog of quotes to prepare and designs to
finalize, Hamilton is anxious to get back to
his office. “The commute is not bad, huh,”
he quips as he walks past his house to his
office. Vegetables, sunflowers, and rhubarb
line the path to the front door, where a
cider press awaits the apples ripening on
trees in the yard. The back fields, which
are nearly ready to be cut, roll down to the
banks of the Kennebec.
“My other title here is ‘Alex, Head of
Maintenance,’” laughs Hamilton. He
shrugs at all there is to do around the
property—he is content to finally be here.
When Alex Hamilton was just 18 years
old, he purchased nearly twenty acres
of land in Belfast on a whim. “I think I
paid about six thousand dollars for it,” he
laughs. “But back then I couldn’t actually
do anything that would have allowed me to
live out there. Maine is on the edge—next
stop Atlantic Ocean.”
“It’s been a lifetime of working to
get here,” says Hamilton with obvious
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satisfaction.
MH+D OCTOBER 08 35
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207-772-3373
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