‘Heart of the home.’ Couple launches Italian furniture company from Cherokee Triangle home

In 2015, Amee and Greg Kent moved into Louisville’s Cherokee Triangle neighborhood. The couple described their home, built in 1871, as a “unique Italian home,” which was fitting given the Kent family’s Italian heritage.

While the home boasted its Italian legacy on the outside, the interior had been renovated with an updated open kitchen and dining area. In an effort to maintain the home’s unique history, the Kents set out to design a dining room set that would bring the house together.

“We wanted to try to combine the traditional historic look of the Italianate home on the exterior with kind of the modern interior open design that was accomplished with remodeling the house,” Greg told the Courier Journal. “We worked with some local craftsmen to kind of experiment in our own dining room.”

This experiment led the Kents to launch a passion project business called Tedesco-Rosa Dining Lab, a dining furniture company with a focus on combining walnut wood and carbon steel.

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“After five years of people really complimenting our dining table, we thought … maybe we can make this in a way that’s … affordable for others,” Greg said.

The Kents started designing products to sell in 2020 and launched Tedesco-Rosa Dining Lab in 2022. The company website officially launched in November.

A six-person custom dining room table and chair set retails for $7,100 and is currently only available online. For orders within 50 miles, shipping is free. The Italian-inspired business also sells chopstick holders, charcuterie boards, cutting boards, and drink coasters, which range in price from $12 to $48. All products are available online only.

To date, the company has sold two dining tables and several smaller products.

“Right now, we’re really interested in making sure that the design, the production, the customer experience is fine-tuned, and we get it right, versus making money at this point,” Greg said.

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The Kents said part of what makes their product different when compared to other dining room sets on the market is that it is a luxury product that allows for customer assembly, rather than the need to hire an assembly person.

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“What we’ve done is combine a luxurious design with the simplicity of kind of an Ikea-like product,” Greg said.

On top of allowing for simple, at-home assembly with easy-to-read instructions, Tedesco-Rosa sources all its materials and labor locally. The walnut wood comes from lumber yards in Southern Indiana and Louisville, the craftsman is Billie Bradford of Bradford Fine Furniture, Neimco Fabricators provides the carbon steel, and Louisville Dynamic Power Coating handles the painting.

“We’ve partnered with local providers, with local craftsmen and women,” Greg said. “Right now, we’re working with three local companies, we’re open to working with other local companies.”

The Kents, who met while students at Indiana University, have enjoyed the opportunity to create a business that pays homage to their family’s past. Amee’s grandmother’s name was Rosalie. Greg’s grandmother, Rosella Tedesco was a first-generation Italian American and she taught Greg the importance of a dining table.

“Every Sunday was this huge production of food, that would just sit on the table for hours, and we would just eat, go off and do something, come back, eat, watch TV, come back, and eat,” Greg said. “It was a whole Sunday event for us as a part of my childhood.”

Crafting dining room furniture has been a way for Amee and Greg to share their familial love of gathering with people across the city.

“The dining table, as we like to say, is the heart of the home,” Amee said. “It’s where you gather for everything, not just meals, but family game night, the nightly homework, you might work from home, there are several things that you do around the dining table.”

Contact reporter Olivia Evans at [email protected] or on Twitter at @oliviamevans_

This article originally appeared on Louisville Courier Journal: Louisville-based Tedesco-Rosa Dining Lab’s Italian dining room sets