Two hundred and fifty years ago, a group of people decided to build something from scratch. The project was imperfect, contested, and ongoing — but at its core was a bet on craft, conviction, and the belief that what you make with your own hands matters.

This issue of What Matters celebrates that spirit in the place we know best: the home. Instead of our usual Global Design section, we’re spotlighting American makers whose work we admire, specify, and live with — companies that design and manufacture right here in the United States, from Brooklyn to High Point to the California coast. These are firms where hands still touch materials, where craft isn’t a marketing word but a daily practice, and where the phrase “made in America” means something you can feel the moment you sit down, look up, or walk across the room.

Happy birthday, America. Here’s to the people who make things.

VERELLEN
Furniture · High Point, North Carolina

Belgian conception, American perfection — that’s the founding idea behind Verellen, and twenty-five years in, it still holds. Tom and Sabine Verellen brought the understated elegance of their native Antwerp to the furniture capital of the United States, where every piece is bench-crafted from sustainably sourced hardwood and upholstered in natural fibers like Belgian linen and virgin wool. The result is furniture that feels lived-in from day one and looks better at twenty years than most pieces do at two. verellen.biz →

SKRAM
Furniture · Burlington, North Carolina

Jacob Marks founded Skram at twenty-five with a history degree and an instinct for proportion. The name is Marks spelled backward — a quiet signal of a company that does things its own way. Working from a repurposed knitting mill powered by a rooftop solar array, Skram builds furniture from Appalachian hardwoods harvested within five hundred miles of the factory. The designs are spare, precise, and grounded in natural materials — timber, leather, metal, stone — with a visual weight that reveals itself slowly. As Marks puts it: there’s enough plastic in the world. skramfurniture.com →

LAWSON-FENNING
Furniture · Los Angeles, California

Glenn Lawson and Grant Fenning met as furniture design students at ArtCenter in the late nineties, started tinkering in a Pasadena studio, and never stopped. Today, every piece in the LF Collection is designed and custom-made in their Los Angeles workshop — clean-lined, California-inflected, rooted in mid-century craft but never nostalgic about it. They complement their own work with curated vintage finds and collaborations with makers who share their sensibility. The showroom on Melrose is worth the visit alone. lawsonfenning.com →

MILLERKNOLL
Furniture · Zeeland, Michigan

Some companies define an era. MillerKnoll — the union of Herman Miller and Knoll — defined modern American design, period. From the Eames Lounge Chair to the Barcelona Chair, from the Aeron to the Womb, these are the pieces that taught the world that American furniture could be as rigorous, as beautiful, and as enduring as anything from Europe. The legacy isn’t just aesthetic — it’s philosophical: the idea that good design belongs in everyday life, not behind a velvet rope. millerknoll.com →

MERIDA
Rugs & Carpet · Fall River, Massachusetts

An American textile house in the truest sense. Merida designs and weaves its rugs to order in a revived mill in Fall River, Massachusetts, using natural fibers — wool, linen, jute, silk — and heirloom looms that are works of craft in their own right. Under creative director Sylvie Johnson, working from her atelier in Paris’s Saint-Germain-des-Prés, every rug is conceived as a one-of-a-kind piece. The company avoids synthetic and oil-based fibers at every stage and donates scrap yarns to the textile programs at RISD and UMass Dartmouth. The philosophy is simple: to manufacture anything in the U.S., it has to be extraordinary. meridastudio.com →

ALLIED MAKER
Lighting · Glen Cove, New York

Ryden Rizzo started Allied Maker in 2013 as an artful woodworking practice. It has since evolved into one of New York’s most respected lighting studios — a Long Island workshop where every fixture is handcrafted from brass, hand-blown glass, and domestic hardwoods. The blackening is hand-applied. The brass is left to develop its own patina over time. The glass globes are mouth-blown by artisans in Vermont. Featured in Architectural Digest, Elle Decor, and Dwell, Allied Maker’s work shows up in boutique hotels and private residences worldwide — but the spirit remains stubbornly local, stubbornly handmade. alliedmaker.com →

IN COMMON WITH
Lighting · Brooklyn, New York

Nick Ozemba and Felicia Hung met at RISD, trained as craftspeople across wood, metal, ceramic, and glass, then founded In Common With in 2018 around a simple idea: make lights, make them beautifully, and make them together with other people. The studio collaborates with ceramicists like Danny Kaplan and glassmakers like Sophie Lou Jacobsen — each collection bearing its own material identity. Their Gowanus studio doubles as a prototyping lab, and their new Tribeca showroom, Quarters, is part retail space, part community gathering point. The name says it all. incommonwith.com →

HEATH CERAMICS
Tile · Sausalito & San Francisco, California

Edith Heath started making ceramics in the 1940s with no formal training, a homemade potter’s wheel built from a sewing machine, and California clay. Nearly eighty years later, every piece of Heath dinnerware is still made by hand in the same Sausalito factory she and her husband Brian built in 1959. The tile factory, now in a sixty-thousand-square-foot Mission District building, produces architectural ceramics in glazes that have graced the Norton Simon Museum, Chez Panisse, and countless private homes. A B Corp and a Cooper Hewitt National Design Award winner, Heath is proof that craft and scale aren’t opposites — they’re partners. heathceramics.com →

FIRECLAY TILE
Tile · Aromas, California

Founded in 1986, Fireclay was the first tile company in the world to earn B Corp certification — and the first to introduce one hundred per cent lead-free glazes, back in 1988. Today, the employee-owned company handcrafts ceramic, glass, and glazed brick tile in its California and Washington factories, with clay sourced from the Sierra Nevada foothills and recycled granite from local quarries. Over one hundred hand-applied glazes, forty recycled body shapes, and a direct-to-consumer model that puts the maker and the client in the same conversation. About seven pairs of hands touch every tile they make. You can feel it. fireclaytile.com →