William Dorsey may live in neighboring Pitt County, but he has a reputation here for very fine finishes: walls, paint, cabinets, even wallpaper. What’s less known about Dorsey is his true passion: wood.

Dorsey’s woodworking started out as a bet made with a friend. The result of the bet—which he won—was a work of art masquerading as a piece of furniture.

“My hands kind of took to it. My brain kind of took to it. … I realized I had a knack for making stuff out of wood,” Dorsey explained. “

With a combination of old world skills and modern technology, Dorsey creates beautifully inlaid coffee tables emulating shapes usually seen on wheels, waves, wakes and snow. It’s furniture that falls into a niche for extreme sports aficionados and lovers of quality woodwork.

“Everybody who does these sports is passionate about what they do,” Dorsey said. “It’s so much a part of their lives that they couldn’t live without it.”

Dorsey calls his creations “a labor of love” as he’s involved from table’s start to table’s end: finding wood, milling wood, bending and shaping it, inlaying and finally polishing it off with a protective coating. He said other than mahogany, he uses woods native to the Carolinas: America black walnut, black cherry, eastern red cedar, eastern white cedar, maple and sometimes the rare pecan or hickory.

“They’re kind of hard to work with,” he laughed.

But work with them he does. A table of an oversized skateboard starts with a solid mahogany base shaped like a skateboarder’s half pipe. The deck of the skateboard—the table’s surface—is a ¾ inch slab of curved solid walnut, inlaid with a Louis XIV pattern of tumbling cubes made from figured maple, walnut and mahogany. Inset into the geometric pattern is a laser-cut silhouette of a skateboarder in maple set in a walnut background. The table’s wheels are crafted by spalted pecan.

“When you start cutting wood, it’s almost like you get one chance—shapes just naturally appear from grain patterns,” Dorsey explained. “It just kind of shows itself.”

Dorsey has spent the last three decades living in Ayden, known as the barbecue capital of the world. Dorsey, however, wants to give the town a bigger profile on the map by eventually making it the extreme furniture capital of the world.

“I’m just going to stay in this thing until people know I do this quality stuff,” Dorsey said. “I truly believe it to be functional art.”

Dorsey’s designs are displayed at Overton’s in Raleigh and Greenville and can be found at www.dorseydécor.com and www.dorseyoriginals.com.