New Manufacturer: Hubbardton Forge
Hubbardton Forge still forges metal by hand in Vermont, which in 2026 makes it an outlier rather than a heritage story. It started more than forty-five years ago with two people, an old barn and borrowed tools, and the work is still done one piece at a time.
What hand-forged actually buys you
It shows up in the places a mould can’t reach. The taper where a stem was drawn out under a hammer, the small difference between two of the same sconce, the way a joint reads as made rather than assembled. Every piece passes through several sets of hands before it leaves, and their design director puts the ambition plainly.
“We make heirlooms, not landfill.”
The finishes are where the specification gets decided
Ideas start as a sketch, or paper, or foam — whatever holds the shape long enough to argue about — and the forge team turns the survivors into metal. The finish then does most of the work in a room, because forged texture takes a patina differently than a smooth casting does, and two fixtures in the same bronze won’t read the same under a warm lamp and a cool one. Worth looking through the whole finish range before you commit to one.
What they do about the waste
A forge is a dirty business, and they’ve spent a long time making theirs less so. They were among the first shops in Vermont on powder coating and water-based metal cleaning, and the first anywhere to beta-test a phosphate-free bioremediation cleaner for their wash tanks, which they still run today. None of that shows up in the photograph. It shows up in the shop.
See their range on our line card
Want to learn more about Hubbardton Forge? Email us your questions!
Keep reading
- Accord Lighting — a family carpentry shop that turned to light.
- How Lighting Affects How a Room Feels — what the research supports, and what it does not.
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