Sawyer Made

Sawyer Made is the Vermont workshop of George Sawyer, a second-generation Windsor chairmaker based in South Woodbury. He grew up playing in the wood shavings of his father's Windsor chair shop, studied Industrial Design at the Rhode Island School of Design, and spent several years in product design, architecture, and steam engine building before returning to Vermont to train with his father and formally launch Sawyer Made in 2012. The studio designs and builds furniture firmly rooted in American Windsor and Shaker traditions, evolving those forms to meet the needs of the modern world. Work begins with local lumber, often with the log itself, and every component is shaped to follow the grain and harness the natural strength and flexibility of native wood species. Much of it is done with the same traditional hand tools chairmakers have used for hundreds of years: wedge and froe for splitting, drawknife for carving, adze and inshave for shaping. New designs come from the needs of a client, or from daily life - an architectural detail, an antique object, or a branch discovered on a walk in the woods.