Issue link: http://papercitymagazine.uberflip.com/i/1545488
PHOTO BY MATTIE EDWARDS HEWITT. COLLECTION THE NEW YORK HISTORICAL original panels instead, just enough to cover his dining room. Ming Garden on a metallic background is Gracie's reproduction of the original antique paper. RS American Furniture Makers The Kittinger Furniture Company, established in Buffalo, New York, in 1866, set the standard for American handcrafted fine furniture for 160 years. Working in classic 18th-century styles in mahogany, walnut, and rosewood, the firm builds to order for some of the most distinguished interiors in the country including the White House, where its work began with the Nixon administration in 1969. After a mid-1990s closure, master cabinetmaker Ray Bialkowski purchased the company in 1996, brought the original craftsmen back, and has been building furniture to order in North Buffalo ever since. making, and more. Its graduates carry those disciplines into workshops across America — and Texas has become a notable outpost of the legacy. In Fort Worth, North Bennet Street historic preservation carpentry graduate Brent Hull has built one of the South's most respected architectural millwork and restoration practices, earning multiple Traditional Builder Palladio Awards and ICAA John Staub Awards for classical craftsmanship. In Dallas, North Bennet Street alumnus D.H. Phillips creates bench-made, one-of-a-kind furniture — chairs, tables, beds, dressers, credenzas, desks, and case pieces — working entirely pencil to paper on a drafting table, no computers involved. RS Eleanor Beard Studio Eleanor Beard founded her studio in 1921 in Hardinsburg, Kentucky, after her husband, a general store owner, began accepting wool from local farmers who couldn't pay cash. Rather than let the surplus sit, Eleanor put it to work, taking orders for hand-quilted linens. She had studied trapunto, a form of raised quilting, in Europe, and it became her signature. At its height, the studio employed more than 1,000 women in Breckinridge County; many credited those wages with seeing them through the Depression. Shops opened in New York and Chicago. When the studio was set to close in 2002, Jane Scott Hodges purchased the workroom to preserve it. From that came Leontine Linens, now the premier destination for custom bespoke linens in the United States, operating from a New Orleans showroom on Magazine Street. Every piece is made to order, hand-finished, and designed to become an heirloom. RS Gracie Studio When Gracie was founded in New York City in 1898, it introduced something that most American designers had never been able to source domestically: authentic hand-painted Chinese wallpaper. More than 125 years later, the company is still family-owned, now in its sixth generation, still painting every panel by hand to order on tea-leaf paper or silk. Perhaps no piece captures the Gracie mystique better than the Condé Nast wallpaper, installed in the publishing magnate's Manhattan apartment in the 1920s, removed when the apartment was dismantled in 1943, and kept in Gracie's storage for nearly 70 years. When designer Michael S. Smith came looking for a reproduction, Gracie sold him several Old Hickory Furniture Company, named for President Andrew Jackson, was incorporated in 1899 in Indiana and has been making its signature hickory sapling furniture ever since. The process is elemental: saplings shaped and joined using mortise-and-tenon construction, with seats woven from inner bark strips. Among its earliest customers were the National Parks; the dining chairs shipped to Yellowstone's Old Faithful Inn in 1904 are still in use. Today, Old Hickory is based in Shelbyville, Indiana, and every piece is still made by hand. Gracie wallpaper, ballroom, Condé Nast Residence, 1040 Park Avenue, New York, 1927 The Murphy Room, 1620-1730, Bayou Bend Collection and Gardens, MFAH Eleanor Beard Catalog Hand Quilted Gifts, 1930s COURTESY MUSEUM OF FINE ARTS, HOUSTON