On the Verge showcases emerging talent from the worlds of fashion, food, music, art and design.
This year, the dining-room fires were first lit at Stissing House, the restaurant in Pine Plains, N.Y., on Sept. 26. Last year, it was Oct. 4. The chef Clare de Boer, who took over the upstate tavern in 2022, always notes the date; it marks both a seasonal transition — on the menu, wood-roasted sunshine kabocha squash and fall vegetables with wild rice replace marinated heirloom tomatoes and peach pie — and the start of an important pre-service ritual. The 1782 building has five fireplaces, including one “so large you could fit a queen-size mattress in it,” says de Boer, and lighting them all during the colder months takes 20 minutes a day.
Accordingly, de Boer, 35, has developed an appreciation for fire tools. This month, she released her own set — a steel poker, shovel and andirons — through Roseland, the furniture brand she founded with her husband, the entrepreneur Luke Sherwin, last year. “I wanted to make pieces that were simple and architectural, large in scale but with all the details that make them useful,” she explains over rosemary apple pound cake at the couple’s home in Brooklyn’s Park Slope neighborhood. The shovel is six inches wide so fewer scoops are required to clean out a fireplace. The poker is about three feet long so no matter how big the hearth, de Boer says, “you can really get in there.” Scrolls at the top of both pieces allow them to be hung from the mantle. The pair of andirons have faceted ball tops and feet that curve up like jester shoes.
The pieces were forged by the blacksmith Matt Foster and his team at Black Dog Ironworks in Enfield, Maine, who also developed a martini table for de Boer and Sherwin that’s currently in use at Stissing House and available through Roseland. The sinuous, three-legged steel design was inspired by an 18th-century table the couple saw in the digital archive of the Winterthur museum, located in the former Delaware mansion of Henry Francis du Pont, a collector of American furniture and art. “Everything we’re doing is drawing from the American design canon,” says de Boer.
She sees Roseland as another way to “draw people into an experience,” she says. Namely, the feeling of being at home in the Hudson Valley that she and Sherwin, 35, have enjoyed since 2018, when they bought a house in Dover Plains. At the time, de Boer was working six days a week at King, the restaurant she co-founded in Manhattan, but the couple began spending whatever time they could upstate, filling their home — and later, Stissing House — with vintage American furniture. They felt a particular affinity with the Shaker style, originated by the religious group of the same name that moved to New York in the 18th century and made furniture with a focus on simplicity and durability. With three children under the age of 6, de Boer says, “everything in our house needs to be as strong and usable as it is aesthetically pleasing.”
The first products she and Sherwin released were a wooden platform bed and a butcher block kitchen worktable. The bed, created in partnership with the Morgan, Texas-based furniture-maker Kenon Perry, has thin tapered legs and is made from American cherry or black walnut wood. A raw linseed oil finish lets the grain shine through and improves the wood’s longevity: If it gets damaged, says Sherwin, “you just sand out the ding and add oil.” Roseland ships the pieces unassembled and wrapped in butcher paper to soak up any excess; some customers have compared their arrival to receiving a giant brisket. In August, the company added a Shaker-inspired night stand, also made by Perry, to its lineup.
Roseland is the first venture that Sherwin and de Boer have worked on together professionally. He brings a knowledge of supply chains and home goods — he co-founded the mattress company Casper in 2014 and later the home renovation company Block, which he left in 2022 — and is also “a tree fanatic,” says de Boer. (Roseland plans to donate three percent of its profits to organizations involved in bringing back the American Chestnut.) For de Boer, Roseland is, she says, an extension of her ethos around food: “good ingredients, minimally finished, not a lot of fuss.” But it’s a personal project, too. They named the company for their newest property upstate, a onetime dude ranch a ten-minute drive from Stissing House where they hope to one day live and raise livestock that would supply meat to the restaurant — part of a grander vision to bring everything they do closer to home.
The post From a Celebrated Chef, a New Line of Home Goods appeared first on New York Times.
