The shop
Tryon has been a crafts town since the Toy Makers and the chair factory. Dogwood & Pi is a smaller, later chapter of that same instinct: make it here, make it true.
Chris Simpson, owner
Chris Simpson is the shop. Neighbors in Tryon and Columbus know him as the person you can leave in the house — meticulous, respectful, still there for the last hinge and the last wipe-down.
The work is cabinets, metal, floors, trim, and the remodel jobs that sit next to them. A kitchen that needed to open up. A floor for someone’s mother. Steel when the wood called for it. He does not send a crew ahead of himself.
People write the same two things: the work is exact, and the man is someone you would have back.
This ground
The shop sits at 1151 Markham Road, a few minutes from Trade Street — brick storefronts, Morris the horse, and a town that has always mixed artists, horsemen, and people who work with their hands.
The Thermal Belt keeps the winters milder. The Blue Ridge sits right over the kitchen window. Houses here are often older, particular, and worth taking care of.
The name
One is native — white blossoms in spring, hardwood, the thing North Carolina put on the state seal. The other is the number you use when a circle has to be right, and then use again, because it never quite finishes.
That is the shop in two words: material that grew here, and work that does not shrug at a gap.
