It’s an exciting time for venerable furniture house Hickory Chair: Over the past decade or so, they’ve moved 90 percent of their manufacturing stateside to their Hickory, NC workshop (a whopping 600,000 square feet of sheer productivity); they’ve been collaborating with top designers, even inviting some onto the workshop floor to get a two-day education during “Hickory Chair University”; they’re crafting—and delivering—top-notch custom pieces in two weeks’ time.
And, this year the company turns 100. Naturally, they’re celebrating big.
I recently met with Hickory Chair president Jay Reardon at the Hoff Miller showroom at the Denver Design District to get the scoop on the company’s latest furniture designs and to hear how they’re bringing in the 1-0-0. (Here, we’re sitting on a Hickory Chair sofa, of course, that’s in front of a Hickory Chair cabinet, with a Hickory Chair coffee table pulled up in front.)
Jay filled me in on the company’s Centennial Collection—a furniture line designed in celebration of this most-important anniversary. The Hickory Chair designers went back in time, revisited the company’s archives from the 1920s and ’30s, and resurrected those pieces with “great bones,” Reardon says. Then they reshaped them—streamlined contours, changed finishes, added new hardware—and brought the pieces forward to the present day.
In addition to releasing the Centennial Collection, Hickory Chair also hosted a little celebratory design-off called the Centennial Design Challenge. Contestants dreamed up a personalized design based on any of the company’s furniture, or created an original piece—and the winner will score $10,000 in custom furnishings. Catch the winning design at hickorychair.com/challenge, and swoon over the amazing collections at hickorychair.com.
