Vermont Wood Products Marketing Council

Connecting members of the Vermont wood products industry and promoting the Vermont quality wood products brand

Furniture Vermont-Style

By Chris Granstrom

Reprinted by permission from the Spring 2004 issue of Vermont Life magazine

Just out of college, with a notion of building a life outside the corporate mainstream, a knack for working with wood, and an eye for the beauty of Vermont, Tim Copeland moved to Bradford in 1971. His interest in wood led him to a job with a lumber company. One of their customers was Garden Way, the legendary supplier of the necessities of rural living to the newly ex-urban. By the mid-70s, Garden Way determined that a backyard cider press was something that any homesteader would need. Tim Copeland said he could build them. So he quit his job, and went into production.

The cider presses were a hit. At the peak, Copeland built, and Garden Way sold, 7,000 presses a year. Copeland had some employees by that time, of course, and a small shop. He discovered that he had knack for running a business. He expanded his line, building butcher block tables for Garden Way, and then for other stores. He expanded further to other basic, square pieces of furniture, what he now calls “furniture by the pound.” By 1984, he was selling $1.2 million dollars worth of it a year.

By then, he had expanded into what was his fourth building in Bradford, with 18,000 square feet of factory floor. Then, on a November night in 1984, the whole thing burned. “It was a total loss,” Copeland recalled. “We were at a decision point. Do we hang it up, or do we rebuild.”

He rebuilt. And he raised his notion of what he would come out of the new factory. “It was time to build furniture with some element of design,” he said. His wares went from blocky to elegant, and the world seemed eager for what he was building. The factory is still in the same location, and it has expanded several times. Now, 90 employees keep busy on a floor that's nearly the size of two football fields. Some of the machines there would make any basement handyman's eyes grow round with wonder. (Just for example, one rip saw uses lasers to measure the width of a board, consults its memory for what dimensions are needed for the work at hand, adjusts the saw blades to make the most efficient cuts, and makes the cuts, all in a couple of seconds.)

Standing by that rip saw, you can look out the door and see the raw material in a shed, the great stacks of rough sawn lumber, held together with steel bands and marked with a crayon-scrawled code. That lumber comes in through the back door, displaying little promise of the elegant furniture it is to become. It begins its slow journey across the floor getting planed, cut to length, ripped to width, glued into panels (or used as a single piece), shaped, sanded, assembled, coated, equipped with hardware, tested for fit, and packed for delivery. At the far end, just before they are put on trucks, silky smooth chairs, the graceful end tables, the imposing desks accumulate near the loading dock, waiting to be wrapped. The mere ten minutes, or so, that it takes to walk this route just emphasizes the nearly inconceivable transformation that the scuffed up lumber out in the shed undergoes.

Taking the longer view, you might consider that the process really began a hundred or more years ago when the tree itself started growing. Maybe when McKinley was President, or even Grant, a sugar maple seed twirled to the earth on a Vermont hillside and sent a delicate root down to probe the springtime earth. Or it could have been an ash, cherry, and oak seed those are used, too, and several other species as well. And while the wood doesn't all come from Vermont trees, most of it, at least, comes from the northeastern U.S. The point is that Vermont furniture isn't just made here, it grows around here.

The style, the shape, the look of much of Vermont's furniture is home-grown, too. “The designs are more basic and straightforward,” said Tim Copeland. “This simplicity is both conscious and subconscious. It's informed by the environment in which we live. Vermont with all its beautiful little villages and architecture informs our sense of proportion and aesthetic. We don't use heavy, complex finishes The wood itself is closer to the surface. In Vermont, we tend to highlight the natural material.”

Not all furniture made in Vermont fits this style, but it's an approach used by a distinct group of makers, now mostly somewhere on either side of age fifty. Their furniture has been so successful that the it might be thought of as a “Vermont style.” Most of the people who have created this style started building furniture in the 1970s. They were craftsmen and small-time entrepreneurs consciously building furniture as a way to build a life in a place they had chosen. Some of these entrepreneurs are in the big-time today, but they've held onto the notions of solid construction and clean design that they started with.

At the Old Mill in Bridgewater, Charles Shackleton is building Vermont furniture with what might be called a British accent. He grew up in Ireland, studied crafts at a college in England, and moved to Vermont in 1981 to work as an apprentice glass blower to Simon Pearce (who was himself moving from Ireland to Vermont at the time). He worked at Pearce's Quechee shop as a glassblower for five years. Then, in 1986, Shackleton left glassblowing and started his own business as a furniture maker. For the next fifteen years, nearly all of his pieces were sold through the Simon Pearce store. Three years ago, he decided to make a completely independent business at the present location in Bridgewater which includes both the shop and a showroom. It also includes the pottery business of his wife, Miranda Thomas, whom he had met at college in England, and who had also come to Vermont to work for Simon Pearce.

Both Shackleton and Thomas feel that handmade objects create a special connection between the maker and the owner. “We felt that machines had taken away a lot of the character of the work,” Shackleton said, “that's why we do a lot of hand work, hand carving.” Twelve furniture makers work at the Bridgewater shop, and spend most of their days with planes and chisels in their hands. The quiet sound of a sharp plane slicing off a thin curl of hardwood could come from another era. “We get a lot of executives from New York who come around to the workshop and think twice about their own career,” Shackleton said.

The rough cutting out of the lumber that goes into the furniture is done by machine. “But it's pretty limited,” Shackleton said. “It takes about 8 to 10 hours to make a side chair, and only about one and a half hours of that is machine work, the rest is all hand planing, hand shaping, assembly, and finishing. And it's all done by one person all the way through. If a machine could do everything that we do, I wouldn't be interested. I'm interested in what the hands and the human brain can do. I believe that the human hand adds an aura to the piece that is unobtainable by machine.” Of course, it also adds to the cost of the furniture, which is considerably more expensive than most of the furniture made in Vermont.

The design of Shackleton's furniture draws on a wide range of inspirations. “It's a mix of English Georgian furniture and Irish country furniture,” he said. “And I absolutely love some of the cottages up at Shelburne Museum, particularly the early New England furniture which is incredibly plain and simple, almost modern in the fact that it was so simple.”

So is there a Vermont style of furniture? “I definitely think there is,” said Dwight Sargent, founder and owner of Pompanoosuc Mills in Thetford. “It's natural North American hardwoods, natural finish, clean designs. You'll find that with all of us Copeland, Pompanoosuc Mills, Vermont Tubbs, Vermont Furniture Designs. If you go to North Carolina [center the US furniture industry] you get much more of that dark finish, and the ornate, Italianate look. I definitely think there is a New England, Northeast design. A lot of us fit right in with the ones that I've mentioned.”

Sargent started making furniture in a small barn in 1973 while he was still in business school at Dartmouth. He and a single employee started building beds and dining tables. For the first few years, he sold the pieces out of his house. The customers liked what they got and came back for more. A homemade sign from that first shop, with slightly peeling paint, leans against the wall in his office today.

The Pompanoosuc Mills factory in Thetford now has 110 employees. They sell nearly all their wares through their own retail shops where another 40 or so employees work. There are twelve stores (so far) in locations ranging from Burlington, Vt. -- where the first store opened in 1976 -- to Cambridge, Ma, to Philadelphia, and in many stylish locales between. Everyone who walks into a store speaks to an employee who is within a couple of steps of the company's top management. “Every day is a customer service day,” said director of marketing Rob Chapin, with a smile.

On a working day, the big factory floor is a beehive of activity. There are plenty of big, noisy machines, but on a closer look, a remarkable number of people are doing jobs by hand. One man traces a series of dining chair legs onto a piece of lumber with a ballpoint pen, before cutting them out with a bandsaw. Thirty to fifty dining chairs is the usual weekly output, though on a recent busy week, the shop turned out 125. Each piece is assembled by a single builder who signs and dates the back when he, or she, is finished. Karen F. Bickel has her signature on two dressers waiting to be taken to the finishing room, and she is working on another. An entire upholstery shop is tucked away in an upstairs loft.

Sargent said that he sells about $15 million worth of furniture each year. And he's aiming for $50 million. There's an architect's rendering of an enormous furniture factory pinned to the wall near his office. Sargent pointed out the existing building at one end of the drawing, all but dwarfed by the image of what he hopes will come.

Up in Shelburne, in a corner of the enormous Farm Barn at Shelburne Farms (a building dwarfed by none), Jeff Parsons runs a small furniture shop along with his business partner, Bruce Beeken. They met in the mid-70s when there were both enrolled in a furniture design and construction program at Boston University. Within a few years, they were both working in Vermont and in 1983 they decided to form a partnership. Their business is much smaller than Copeland or Pompanoosuc Mills just the two of them and a couple of employees. They often build one-of-a-kind pieces to a customer's specifications. They also create pieces for institutional buyers like universities. On the institutional jobs, they create the design, the prototypes, and the shop drawings, then they farm out the actual production to larger wood products manufacturers. They make some standard pieces, too, and these are on display in the showroom, which is upstairs from their woodshop in the Farm Barn.

“The Vermont style is simple and direct,” said Jeff Parsons. “There is an absence of surface decoration. Vermont furniture is made with solid wood, and surface decoration is not consistent with this design. Vermont grows some of the best wood in the world, and the Vermont furniture industry has always been about solid wood. Many of the designers of Vermont furniture were also builders, and their designs grow out of the process of building.”

Beeken and Parsons have taken the unusual step of finding some of their “decoration” in the wood itself. They sometimes use pieces of wood that have knots, streaks, and mixtures of sapwood and heartwood lumber that has traditionally been considered defective. Proving that beauty is truly in the eye of the beholder, they have redefined these “defects” as “character marks” and make prominent use of them in some of their work. Using this character wood not only added a new dimension to their furniture, they came to realize that this wood actually promoted better forestry practices because many trees with defects make that “character” could now be included as part of a management plan, allowing the forester much greater flexibility.

“We became interested in character wood initially as furniture makers, but as we got into it, we found that one of the most appealing aspects of it is that the use of character wood in our type of woods products, the higher value wood products, has been that it is embraced by both the environmental community and the wood products industry. These are two groups that seldom see eye to eye.”

Beeken and Parsons realize that some of their customers will always want furniture with clear grained wood, and they will continue to build that. But their interest in the character wood has even led them modify some of their machinery to adapt to the varying grains they find. A tour of the shop is a look at the worldwide woodworking technology from the last half-century from an American double-sided copy shaper from 1960 (“We knew that it was coming up for auction down in Pennsylvania and we went down and bought it”), to a Dutch tenon cutter, to a modern oscillating-slot, mortising machine from Italy.

Parsons and Beeken take turns working in their retail shop, upstairs in the Farm Barn from the wood shop which is open only on Saturdays. The furniture is displayed in the center of a room that has stacks of lumber all around the walls, and a lumber drying kiln in one corner. “It's a working showroom,” Parsons said. “I think people find it interesting to see furniture in a room where they can see the raw lumber. It helps us explain what it going on.”

What's going on in a room like this and at Copeland, Shackleton, Pompanoosuc Mills, and at other furniture makers throughout Vermont is the continuous evolution of this Vermont style. The skills of the builder, the imagination of the designer, the needs of the customers, and the wood that comes from the hills nearby all gets put together at these companies, and out come chairs, tables, beds, and other pieces that, each in its own way, somehow contain a little bit of the essence of Vermont.

Last updated: October 12, 2004