Planning to build, renovate, redecorate or furnish a home or place of business in the Hudson Valley? Is money no object, while aesthetics and sustainability are high priorities? You’ll want to know about New York Heartwoods, a women-owned company based in Accord in the Rondout Valley. Established in 2011, Heartwoods keeps a low public profile, but is the provider of choice for many discriminating customers who want their intimate surroundings to reflect the essential, authentic beauty of wood.
What makes this company different from other high-end woodworkers is the owners’ commitment to what they call “full-circle design.” What that means is that they manage the entire process of harvesting local storm-fallen trees (or those fated to be culled for road widening or because they threaten buildings), sawing them up into timber and taking them all the way to finished furniture. This whole-tree approach to silviculture is analogous to nose-to-tail, farm-to-table agriculture. Nothing gets wasted. Many of Heartwoods’ clients come to them specifically because they want something beautiful made from a tree on their own property.
“We specialize in the creation of sustainable heirloom-quality wood furniture and the transformation of site-based trees into finished goods,” says New York Heartwoods’ mission statement. “At the center of our practice is the desire to connect and share our deep love for design, process and the natural world; to restore forests through enduring fabrication methods and the creative use of local resources; and to build exquisite objects imbued with story and rooted in place.”
A native of Missoula, Montana, founder, owner and manager Megan Offner says that she “grew up around a lot of clearcuts” and at an early age developed an aversion to the waste of trees. “My mother took her first woodworking class to build me a dollhouse for my fourth birthday,” she recalls. There was never a barrier in her mind to fine carpentry being an appropriate trade for a woman.
Offner obtained a double liberal-arts degree from Lewis & Clark College in Portland, Oregon, followed by certificates in permaculture and sustainable building and design. She bought and renovated a house in Portland, and then another one in Brooklyn. “I felt the effects of working with traditional building materials, the toxicity; it ended up making me chemically sensitive. After that I wanted to work with natural materials.”
The waste that she saw also made a deep impression on her. “I spent seven years in New York doing set design for fashion and print advertising. The sets would end up in the dumpster at the end of the day,” she says. “One billion board-feet of lumber are thrown away every year in America.”
Offner went to study with some of America’s top gurus of sustainable silviculture. One of her mentors was forester Jim Birkemeier, whose Timbergreen Farm in Wisconsin makes high-value finished products from salvaged dead and dying trees. “They use the worst trees first, which is a Native-American tradition,” she explains. Another major influence was Jed Bark of Bark Frameworks in Long Island City, who trained her in fine millwork – mostly custom frames for art galleries. “They let me set up a business on their land. Then people started asking for furniture.”
As she started spending more time upstate, Offner “fell in love with Northeastern forests,” and decided to start a new business. “I moved upstate the weekend of Hurricane Irene. The question became, ‘How do we reclaim all of these trees?’” She founded New York Hardwoods and began working with the mayors of Warwick and Kingston to find ways to repurpose the downed trunks.
“I spent the first five years milling my own wood, and then the furniture thing picked up. I started to work with clients who want things milled from their own trees. So, now I work with local sawyers and millers, and do the fabrication in-house.”
Three years ago, Offner established a partnership with Ashira Israel, an artist, architectural designer, fabricator and professor with degrees in architecture from Pratt Institute and in fashion design from the Fashion Institute of Technology whose “passion lies in blurring the boundaries between art and architecture.” Israel became the company’s head of fabrication, and provided a new home for the company on a former chicken farm in Accord.
In 2022 New York Heartwoods built what they term a “hypersustainable 100 percent solar-powered workshop” in about 5000 square feet of space. The workshop contains the equipment to turn reclaimed timber into fabulous works of decorative art.
The third member of the Heartwoods triumvirate is master fabricator Lindsay Black, a classically trained furnituremaker and teacher with degrees in education and woodworking. “This is the first time it’s been all-women,” says Offner. “This is the dream team.”
She’s thinking about offering classes on subjects such as “tool confidence” to help women and gender-nonconforming people get started in the woodworking trades in the foreseeable future, and is starting to compile a contact list of interested potential students.
But for now, the roomy new shop is open by appointment only to clients when actual production isn’t happening. Everywhere you look are exquisite pieces of furniture, either finished or in progress, and enormous slabs of wood, finely milled, air-dried, and ready to be made into useful objects.
At one workstation, Black is busy applying a non-toxic oil finish to some pieces nearing completion. “We really stand behind no-VOC finishes,” Offner says, Lacquer is sometimes used on pieces that will be exposed to the weather.
There are display shelving units made of reclaimed maple from old desks for the new Etsy headquarters in Hudson; an enormous extendable dining table made from a fallen walnut tree harvested from the client’s property; and custom doors pieced together from new white oak and recycled wormy chestnut. for someone’s palatial residence, there’s a cherry headboard 13 feet across designed to accommodate a king-sized bed with side tables, drawers and shelves on either side, and with integrated lighting and outlets.
Recent large commissions for the company have included 7000 board-feet of installation materials for the Dia Gallery in Chelsea, made from trees cleared from the Ashokan rail-trail, and new paneling and dining-room tables made from trees cleared to create new ski runs for the Little Cat Lodge in Catamount.
What if you don’t have a lot of big logs that need to be cleared away, but just want some bespoke handcrafted furniture? New York Heartwoods has those on hand as well, in several distinct design lines. The prices are not for the fainthearted, running to four figures for a single piece; but these are collectible works of art.
“Our furniture is meticulously crafted to serve our clients’ personal design needs and one-of-a-kind due to the provenance and character of the wood used. Every piece we construct is a meditation on how to best honor the material and highlight its unique beauty,” says the Heartwoods website.
You can get a look at some examples at www.newyorkheartwoods.com/collection-index.
To watch a video of a client’s lightning-struck 300-year-old red oak being transformed into gorgeous lumber, visit www.instagram.com/p/CpQfYM8joqs.
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