Oakleigh Custom Woodworks: Windows of Opportunity

Company started as “a hobby gone wrong” for the husband-and-wife team of Hastings and Anne Read, who have built a solid reputation in Mobile and beyond. 

by Michelle Mattews

At midday every day, Anne Read delivers lunch to the four full-time employees of the business she and her husband of 52 years, Hastings Read, co-founded in 2008. And she’s not bringing them basic sandwiches — her meals, made in the kitchen of her historic home, are prepared with love and care by the Cordon Bleu-trained chef. “We look after them,” Anne says fondly of the craftsmen at Oakleigh Custom Woodworks.

The Reads started the company somewhat late in life, Hastings explained. They had moved to Mobile from Fort Lauderdale, Florida, 20 years ago, when the yacht broker Anne worked for opened a boat yard in Bayou La Batre. They bought a spacious 110-year-old cottage in Mobile’s Oakleigh Historic Garden District. “The house was perfect for what we wanted,” Anne said. “It had good bones, but it needed a new kitchen.”

Hastings, whose own consulting business was winding down at the time, renovated the kitchen himself. Their neighbors took notice, and he found himself renovating some 15 kitchens in the neighborhood. Then, when the windows around their porch were leaking, the Reads had a hard time finding replacements they liked — so Hastings made and installed the 11 windows himself.

From there, it was Anne’s idea to start their own custom woodworking business. “We had nothing to lose,” she said.

They set up shop in a 1,700-square-foot building in the Church Street East neighborhood. “We did everything that came through the door, all sort of things,” Anne said. “It was just the two of us and an occasional helper.”

Their first major project was replacing the windows in the historic Middle Bay Lighthouse. “It got around that we were doing windows,” Anne said — and soon they won a bid to replace 14 5-foot-wide, 22-foot-high windows and four side lights in the sanctuary of Dauphin Way United Methodist Church, a job that constituted 1,000 panes of glass and three separate milling processes.

Although the business started with “an open-ended view of what we’d be doing,” Hastings said, they soon narrowed their focus to doors, windows, shutters and historic trim. “A cabinet shop is a different animal to a window and door shop. We had time to fine-tune things.”

They visited shops all over Europe to purchase the best equipment available. “The tooling required is totally different” for windows and doors, Anne said. “That’s probably the biggest outlay we’ve made.”

Streamlining their work meant that “the team gets really good at it,” Hastings said. “Their expertise filters through the whole enterprise.”

In 2017, they moved into a much larger space at the corner of State and Franklin streets in the downtown Mobile’s DeTonti Square Historic District. The 6,000-square-foot brick building is “still too little space,” Anne noted, “but we make it work.”

The Reads work out of their home office in the renovated and expanded outbuilding in their backyard that originally served as their first workshop. “We had to get out of making and do selling and management,” she said. “It’s been a journey.”

Their replication and renovation work can be seen in historic homes in Mobile, as well as throughout the Northeast. They have a special interest in energy-efficient Passive House projects in which vacuum-insulated glass goes into custom-made wooden windows. “Wood is the only material with a track record of lasting for centuries,” Hastings said.

“Timing and Luck”

Though they’ve lived in the United States since 1984, the Reads were born and raised in England, where they both attended prestigious boarding schools. “Anne and I are products of the classic English upper-class system,” Hastings said. “Both of us were dealt a pretty good hand.”

He worked for an American bank, a position that brought the couple to New York City. He became a consultant and taught business classes at Columbia University for the next 25 years. At one point, he was part of a startup that he refers to as “a heroic failure,” adding:

“Failure is an important part of learning and developing yourself. We had an idea, and it didn’t work, which is much more instructive. When you hear a success story, it’s edited subliminally. There’s no mention of luck, and so much of it is timing and luck.”

Timing and luck — starting with the Dauphin Way church project — might have been factors in the success of Oakleigh Custom Woodworking, but there are some other principles at work that Hastings has learned throughout his career. For one, “I’ve always tried to hire people I think are smarter than I am,” he said.

“We have four very skilled people in our shop,” Anne added. In addition to the perk of a homemade lunch, the Reads say they pay their employees “well above average.”

Nick Gates, the shop manager, runs day-to-day operations. “He’s in charge, and we don’t try to diminish his authority,” said Hastings, who calls Gates “extraordinary” and praises his “quiet, calm leadership.”

Woodworking can be dangerous, which is one of the reasons the Reads have invested in European equipment with high safety standards. While he doesn’t want to jinx it, Hastings says that the company hasn’t had an accident thus far. An expensive guard on a planer manufactured in Switzerland saved one employee’s fingers. “One of our goals is to not maim the people who work for us,” Hastings quipped. “We have tried to hire people who embody their own quality control.”

Along with keeping valued employees safe, another goal is simply to do good work. “The thing we’re most interested in is when the product leaves our workshop, it’s as perfect as it can possibly be,” Hastings said. He cautions that many businesses lose sight of the importance of the product — but not at Oakleigh Custom Woodworks. “Profit is the reward, not the objective,” he says.

The Reads’ exacting standards mean they won’t sell anything they wouldn’t have in their own home. “As Hastings always says, it’s a hobby gone wrong,” Anne said of the business that evolved from their renovation. “It gets us up in the morning. We’re busy, and we really enjoy it.”