Scott Hudson probably never was the type to fit in the crazy world of the software business. "I was really sick of raising money.

I'd spent half my time not thinking about the business, but how to raise the money," he says. "It was like another job unto itself."

So when Hudson was orphaned by the high-tech bubble that burst at century's end, he looked around for a more suitable outlet for his energy. The answer was in his hands. It was his hands.

Hudson is founder and CEO of Seattle-based Henrybuilt. The company designs and handcrafts contemporary furniture and cabinet systems, but is best known for its kitchens. His product line is a young David to gnarly, old European Goliaths, such as Germany's Bulthaup and Italy's Boffi, whose lines have long dominated the high-end market.

"Even before we had a showroom in New York, 25 percent of our business was from there," Hudson says. His Seattle showroom is at Madison Street and Western Avenue, and a Los Angeles space will open in September. There are Henrybuilt clients in every state, but the product is designed and manufactured in Seattle's Georgetown neighborhood.

Started by Hudson and a partner (since bought out) in 2001, the 30-employee company has been profitable since 2004 and is approaching $10 million in revenue this year.

After his 80-employee software company, FizzyLab, fizzled in 2001, Hudson went home to Vashon Island to ponder. "I decided to take six months off and think about what I was going to do next."

He'd learned woodworking in his teen years working summers in his native North Carolina with his grandfather and company namesake, Henry, a cabinetmaker and carpenter. "He was a solid guy; never borrowed a dime in his life; built his house out of rocks from his own property; drove the same Ford pickup for 25 years."

Henrybuilt products are hypermodern, spare, and high-concept, and though his grandfather's cabinetry wasn't aesthetically refined, says Hudson, "The idea of making good things -- he made that compelling."

After those years in high-tech, Hudson's instinct was to do it the old-fashioned way, "to boot-strap it, fund it myself, do the hard work myself. I wanted the company to have a personal element."

In his new business, he says, many elements like marketing, customer service and manufacturing are synthesized in a way that makes the final result stand out. "It's not one killer idea or unfair advantage in one area. That's one thing I wanted to get away from in the start-up high-tech world, where everyone's going for the one in a million and it can start to feel like playing the lottery."

FINDING A MARKET

Hudson found a hole in the market. "If I wanted to buy something that's modern but not too novel, fundamentally clean and really well made, I found that was really hard to find." European products were sophisticated but cold and a little distant. He set Henrybuilt to building something with the modern design values yet warmer and more approachable.

"There's real ownership in what they do," says Kees Goudsmit, a market-savvy, researchdriven consumer who sells European equities on Wall Street. He bought a Henrybuilt kitchen last year for the loftlike apartment where he and his family live in Manhattan's Tribeca. Goudsmit can pay the freight and lives in a city where he can get anything he wants. He was attracted to Henrybuilt's contemporariness- to-warmth ratio, which he credits to Henrybuilt's use of natural woods.

"The European products," says Goudsmit, "even though they're more expensive, use compressed particleboard.