For some people, there’s no sense in trying to escape the past. Especially when you’re Gerald Curry, a talented cabinetmaker in Union.

“In the early ’70s, the old hippies moved away from the cities and became cabinetmakers and tinsmiths,” he said. “Some of us stuck with it.”

Originally from Quincy, Mass., Curry and his wife, Shelia, moved to Boston after he got out of the Army. There he worked as a finish cabinetmaker.

“I’d go to the Museum of Fine Arts,” he recalled. “I’d look at pieces of 18th century furniture, go home, and try to make them.” From there, he started carving reproductions of formal Queen Anne and Chippendale furniture.

Since then, Curry, now 44 and the father of three sons, has made some of the finest copies of 18th century American hand-carved formal furniture around. His work is sought after by collectors who can’t possess the originals because they are owned by museums, but who want that ultimate piece.

One customer has a house full of Curry’s furniture. Among the pieces are a highly carved Philadelphia Queen Anne armchair and a Massachusetts Chippendale block-front secretary. The secretary has two recessed shells carved into the dome-shaped interior of the bookcase section and three smaller shells carved into the blocked desk compartments. A triumph of subtlety, the shells are hidden when the lid of the desk and domed bookcase doors are closed.

He made an elegant Queen Anne highboy with fluted quarter columns on either side, carved and gilded shells and flame finials, and intricate veneered drawers framed by cross-banding veneers, where the pattern and grain travel in opposite directions. Like contrasting collar and cuffs on a dress or suit, the cross-banding on each drawer sets it off.

The original of this particular piece is the frontispiece in Richard Randall’s American Furniture in the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. Curry also made a block-front lowboy for this particular customer.

`He’s picky,” Curry said. “He sent back two drawers.”

Apparently the wood of the rejected drawers didn’t match the other drawers to his satisfaction. Curry replaced them. Now that the persnickety customer’s house is full, he’s been commissioning Curry to make miniatures. Curry has already made several slant-front desks, a Federal inlaid four-drawer chest, and a 7 1/2-inch high by 8-inch wide lowboy. His next assignment is to build a quarter-sized William and Mary highboy with burled wood veneers and cross-banding on the drawers of herringbone inlay, which looks exactly as one would imagine.

“It’s hard enough to make cross-banded drawers full size,” said Curry. “It’s very difficult in miniature.”

That’s just the beginning. He also has to make the brass drawer pulls and other hardware for the miniatures. Although Curry made the wood patterns for the oval Federal stamped brasses and the intricate patterns for the Queen Anne and Chippendale brasses, the castings are made in Delaware. Curry then bends thin brass rods to make the bails, or handholds, for the miniature brass plates.

The two most distinctive features about Curry’s furniture are gorgeous woods and superb carving.

“Finding beautiful wood is hard,” he said. “It requires picking through pile after pile of lumber. Then when you find a great piece, most of the board gets used somewhere else because only one part is great.”

A case in point: Curry used superb, highly figured crotch walnut for the splat of his Philadelphia Queen Anne armchair. The rest of the board — 6 to 8 feet — was plain.

Some woods are more difficult to work than others.

“Working with curly maple is hard,” Curry said. He explained the wood’s grain is wavy, swinging back and forth, instead of heading in one direction. As the plane sweeps across the plank, pieces of wood chip out.

“Bird’s eye maple is the same way,” he said. “All those little eyes want to pop out.”

Carving, Curry said, is kind of like handwriting and notes that when a person copies handwriting, it’s stilted. The carvers of the original pieces knew what they wanted to carve and because it was their expression of the form the carving flowed naturally.

“If you have to copy, you stop that flow,” said Curry.

Consequently, in the last five years, he developed contemporary furniture designs and a third of his output is now devoted to contemporary pieces.

“That’s actually the direction I’d like to go,” he said. “I’d like to make fewer copies and more contemporary furniture. Maybe it’s an ego thing. I’d rather make something I designed.”

He’s about to finish a handsome, curly maple, glass-doored cupboard he designed and built for his brother, based on some photographs sent by his sister-in-law.

“Contemporary furniture is not more difficult to make , but it’s more difficult to design,” said Curry. “I start with an idea, and have nothing to compare it to.”

Curry said he composes the piece as he works and aims for the right proportions. “When you’ve got it down on the bench it looks fine. You get it up and the doors on and say, `Whoops, that’s too big.’ ”

He’d spoken about the top convex moulding of the curly maple cupboard. The concave, or cove moulding, just below it is right, but that top convex moulding may be too bold. Curry mused on it, brought out another piece of moulding and said he’d remove the top one, trim it down, change it a bit. Designing and building seem to be a process of trial and error with the eye as final judge.

When it comes to repairs, Curry said he hates to compromise, like the time a furniture dealer wanted him to put a new top on a piece, brought in an old one and wanted him to marry them.

“It’s the deceit that I don’t like,” Curry said. “Not the fixing.”

Curry will usually make the repair, but in a way that it won’t fool people with a trained or expert eye.

With repair under way, Curry said it’s a challenge to fix a piece so it looks like an original.

“It’s an uncomfortable thing. You sort of sneak up to that line . Sometimes you go over it, sometimes you leave a clue, on the back. Maybe. Nothing that’s obvious from the front.”

Do such changes constitute questionable ethics?

“It’s more fun, more of a test of skill for a craftsman to fake a piece,” Curry said.

Curry’s customers pay for the quality. He charged $990 for a Queen Anne walnut stool with an apron of highly figured wood. A Chippendale piecrust tea table in beautifully figured mahogany cost $4,100. And his Chippendale blockfront secretary with those recessed shells cost $20,500 — a fair price when you consider that respected manufacturer Kindel Furniture of Grand Rapids, Mich., charges around $25,000 for a block-and-shell secretary, and most of the work is machine done. The curly maple glass-doored cupboard will sell for $3,000.

“It depends on the complexity of the piece. It’s certainly not cheap,” Curry said.

Curry has made a number of pieces of contemporary furniture for Tenant’s Harbor antiques dealer Ross Levett and his wife, Susan.

“I think he has a genius for proportion,” said Levett. “He’s as skilled as anybody I’ve come in contact with. He combines that with a wonderful sense of style and design.”

“He’s not just another cabinetmaker.”