“Bear in mind,” reads a sign at the entrance to the ShackletonThomas showroom, “every object in this room made by us started out as a lump of clay or a piece of wood.” That’s all it says, yet there is so much more to the story.
The 38-year-old Bridgewater company that makes handmade pottery and furniture is named for Charlie Shackleton and Miranda Thomas, the married team who operate it. The two designer-artisans — and the six furniture makers and five potters they employ — are preserving traditional techniques. In an era of mass-produced home furnishings, craftspeople at ShackletonThomas make art that’s designed to be used and built to last.
They work the old-fashioned way, Shackleton said, “because we believe in human hands creating things. And we believe that people nowadays are looking for things that feel like a human being has made it.” Handmade objects, he said, “represent the human soul in a way, but they also represent our lifestyle in Vermont. They represent the team of people that is working in this building.”
The furniture shop, showroom and company offices are housed in the former Bridgewater Woolen Company, in a section of the mill built in 1920. Visitors to the first-floor showroom can walk upstairs to watch furniture makers at work. Each has their own bench.
Workshop manager Shea Rodgers assigns a piece of furniture to one of his colleagues and that maker builds it, start to finish. Most pieces are made from cherry or American black walnut. On a Tuesday in June, Troy Woods, a former electrician and sculptor, clamped the trim onto the front of a sofa-table drawer. For generations, the slim table’s elegant lines and delicate dovetails will offer silent testimony to the skill of the hands that made it.
Nearby, Connor Rockwell shored up the mortise-and-tenon joints in a set of cottage chairs the company built in 1994. They’d gotten a bit wobbly after 30 years. ShackletonThomas did not charge for the work; it guarantees structures for life.
At another bench, thinner-than-paper wood shavings fell to the floor as Knox, a former stringed-instrument builder who uses only his last name, hand-planed the leg of a trestle table to satiny smoothness. Every piece of every table, chair, bed, lamp and cabinet is hand-planed. Some people come into the showroom just to touch the furniture.
Thomas’ pottery has been given as official gifts by presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama.
Inside the pottery studio next door, Thomas and her team apply the same exacting standards as they make mugs, bowls, vases and platters that stem from English slipware tradition. Potters learn each step of the process. On that Tuesday, Meg Gray threw pots on a wheel while Jess King carved out graceful rabbits on a mug with a slender bamboo tool. Thomas deftly brushed thin, wavy blue lines around the rim of a large platter, then quickly turned them into lush vines.
Equal parts art, geology and chemistry, the work requires understanding the interaction of the clays, slips, glazes and kilns. “We’re really cooking with rocks,” Thomas said.
Thomas designs every piece of Miranda Thomas Pottery, but she celebrates the subtle differences that occur when various potters make it. Each puts their own signature mark on the bottom. “It’s funny,” Gray said. “You can go into the store and, without even picking up a pot, be like, ‘Evan made that. Jess made that. Christi made that one.'”
“And that’s the beauty,” Thomas said. “That’s the incredible message we’re trying to get out there. We’re all trying to be consistent, but we also don’t want to be consistent. We want to be special.”
The dominance of factory-made wares has trained consumers to think a mug should cost $12. Human hands don’t even touch those when they’re being made, Thomas said. “You’re just literally taking a liquid clay and pouring it into a mold.” The white slipware mug King was decorating sells for $95. A large vase costs $280 and a salad serving bowl, $600.
ShackletonThomas’ furniture prices, too, reflect the skills and hours invested. Most pieces involve custom work. Beds range from $7,000 to more than $27,000. Dining room tables start at $2,000. Thomas’ pottery has been given as official gifts by presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, former speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, and the United Nations. Recipients include former secretary of state Madeleine Albright, two U.N. secretaries general and two popes.
Twin Farms, a luxury Barnard resort where a one-night stay averages $3,600, gives a small piece of the company’s pottery as a gift to its guests and features ShackletonThomas furniture and pottery throughout its property.
Cellist Yo-Yo Ma has a 10-foot custom-made dining room table, but Shackleton claims not to know if other celebrities own his furniture. He doesn’t pay attention to them, he said.
According to company lore, a staff member picked up the phone one day, then excitedly ran to tell Shackleton that Glenn Close was calling.
“Who’s he?” Shackleton replied. He offered the same response upon learning that Tony Bennett was inquiring about a dining room table.
The fact that ShackletonThomas makes world-class furniture and pottery in a tiny Vermont town defies the odds. Shackleton, a cousin of Antarctic explorer Ernest Shackleton, and Thomas, both 66, have international roots. He was born and raised near Dublin, went to boarding school north of London and spent a couple of summers working in Denmark. She was born to British parents just outside New York City and grew up in Italy, Australia and New York. The couple met in art school in England, though they didn’t date there. They reconnected a few years later in Vermont.
Pottery was an unusual career choice for a woman in Thomas’ world, and Shackleton had been outright discouraged from pursuing any handcraft. “Everyone — including my father — said, ‘That’s a hobby,'” he said. Even at West Surrey College of Art and Design, Shackleton was told, “You will never make any money making things by hand.”
ShackletonThomas owes its start to another artisan who built an eponymous brand: Simon Pearce. Pearce was a well-known glassblower in Ireland about to move his business to Vermont when Shackleton’s brother Arthur designed a garden for him. Charlie was studying glass, wood and metal arts at the time. “I wanted to work in wood when I went to art school,” he said, “but I thought that glassblowing was a tricky skill — and if I learned it, I’d have a job for the rest of my life.”
He asked Arthur to help him get a job with Pearce. The glassblower invited the brothers to dinner, and Pearce offered Charlie a job that night.
“I could see his enthusiasm,” Pearce said by phone. “And I really liked his brother Arthur; we were very good friends. And so I thought it was a risk well worth taking. And it proved to be exactly that.”
Shackleton quit school and moved to Quechee in 1981, where he learned to blow glass. “He learned quickly,” Pearce recalled. More importantly, Pearce showed Shackleton that it was possible to run a successful business making tasteful, handmade products and selling them to an audience that understood their value.
Thomas came to visit Shackleton, who knew that Pearce wanted to expand into pottery. “I’ve found you a potter,” Shackleton told his boss. Thomas, who had studied with British master potters Michael Cardew and Alan Caiger-Smith, started the pottery studio at Simon Pearce in 1984.
She and Shackleton married two years later, and Shackleton pursued his “hobby,” making furniture, in Pearce’s workshop at night. After six years as a glassblower, he left the company to build furniture full time in the basement of his ranch house up the road. When Pearce visited, he saw a bed that Shackleton was making and told him, “Make two of them. I’ll sell one.”
“When Charlie does something, he does it properly.” Simon Pearce
For the next 15 years, Simon Pearce sold Charles Shackleton Furniture, giving the woodworker invaluable exposure.
“I was growing like crazy because of Simon. He had 12 stores, and our sales just went up and up and up,” Shackleton said. His business grew from a single furniture maker in the basement to 27 working in the old woolen mill, selling $2 million worth of furniture annually to Simon Pearce alone.
“The quality of his furniture was outstanding,” Pearce said. “When Charlie does something, he does it properly.”
“I sleep in one of his beds,” he added.
In the late ’90s, Pearce proposed that he and Shackleton become partners in the furniture business, but Shackleton declined. “My father was a sort of terrifying mentor,” Shackleton explained, “and throughout my life, I have pasted that terrifying mentor role onto various people, one of whom was Simon Pearce.” The fear was irrational, Shackleton admitted; Pearce had done nothing to cause it.
A couple of years after Shackleton rejected the offer, Pearce stopped selling Shackleton’s furniture. At the time, Shackleton recalled, Pearce told him, “I think you’d be much happier selling your own furniture.”
“I was flabbergasted, because that was 80 percent of our business,” Shackleton said. Fortunately, his name had appeared on every piece.
Thomas was already making pottery on her own. She and Shackleton printed a catalog and created a website. They opened stores in Woodstock; Stowe; Hanover, N.H.; and Brooklyn, but they found that running them was exhausting. Their factory showroom had higher sales, Shackleton said.
“We decided we wanted to be home in the garden on the weekend, and we wanted to just foster this place and make it a great place to visit,” he said. They closed their last store, in Brooklyn, five years ago.
The COVID-19 pandemic and damage from two floods and a fire have posed additional setbacks. The fire started on the third floor of the old mill last summer. Though it was quickly contained, the building sustained significant water damage, causing the showroom ceiling to collapse. Repairs are now completed, and no signs of damage are apparent to visitors.
The company workforce has shrunk, from 50 in its heyday of selling to Simon Pearce to 20, which Shackleton considers a comfortable level. Pottery and furniture sales have rebounded to $1.3 million a year. Shackleton and Thomas soldier on.
Sophie Shackleton often had a seat at her family’s kitchen table when her parents discussed business, art and their philosophy of why craft matters.
“I’m a firsthand witness to the ways in which they have committed their whole life to this — no matter what,” she said in a phone interview. “They’ve accepted scary financial times. They have had floods and fires, and they always rise to the occasion because there’s just no question that this is what they want to do. Deep in their souls, they know that it’s important and it matters.”
Sophie, 37, said she feels like the “black sheep who didn’t inherit the obsessively-making-things gene.” She worked on the business side of her parents’ company for about 18 months and now is Yo-Yo Ma’s creative producer. Her brother, Hugh, 35, was the furniture shop manager and now works as an artist, designing and making custom furniture.
Her parents provided a magical childhood, Sophie said. “They were always making things with their hands.” Her father baked. Her mother dreamed up elaborate birthday parties. “I believed in Santa Claus ’til I was 14 years old because she was so ornate about the way she created a whole world around it,” Sophie said.
Though she doesn’t share her parents’ passion — they taught her to follow her own — she understands it. “I think that they believe and have personally experienced the ways in which human hands manipulating materials results in something that has more soul than something that is mechanically produced,” Sophie said, “and it’s some sort of communication from one human being to another that lends some kind of aesthetic magic to people’s lives.”
As work wound down on that Tuesday, Thomas and potter Gray tried to describe what happens when one person uses an object handmade by another. The object carries the essence of the person who made it and facilitates an “interlinking of humanity,” Gray said.
“It’s like an exchange in a way. It’s almost like a currency,” Thomas added. “And it’s a language; you can read it. We can go and look at pots in a museum, and you can see exactly where those potters’ hands touched it, where they pulled it a little bit hard.”
“There’s nothing in the English language that describes it,” she continued. “You can try ‘unique’ and ‘handcrafted.’ They’re really boring words to describe what we’re doing.”
The original print version of this article was headlined “Sticks and Stones | Tradition lives on at ShackletonThomas, where craftspeople make furniture and pottery piece by piece”
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Nest — Summer 2025
This article appears in Nest — Summer 2025.
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