New York Heartwoods is a woman-owned forest products consultancy creating circular and climate-positive solutions to designing and building with wood. Working with a vetted network of mills, kilns and fabricators, we coordinate and manage the juggernaut of logistics so site-based or sustainably sourced trees are transformed into high-quality furniture and building materials for residential, commercial and artistic applications.
NYH began as lumber mill in 2011 after Hurricane Irene, and spent five years sawing, drying and selling timber as a way to redirect urban and storm-fallen trees out of chippers, splitters and landfills and into creative hands. We started fabricating furniture in 2013, launched a collection in 2017, and began our process of producing furniture and surfaces from our client’s own trees in 2018. As of late 2024, NYH ceased its internal woodworking operations in order to help more architects, designers, home owners and institutions, both in and beyond our region, integrate site-based and felled trees into their built environments. With our fabricating partner, Makers Accord, we still see that beautiful, environmentally sound, heirloom-quality furniture makes it way into our client’s homes.
Our passion for creating systems of local resilience, matched with our deep affinity for nature, quality craftsmanship, collaboration and process, fuels our work. In the face of a changing climate and increasing forest stressors, we believe that new systems for design and manufacturing are imperative for the conservation of the intact healthy forests that we desperately rely on. We store more carbon when “waste” trees become wood products.
New York Heartwoods has had the privilege of being featured in such publications as Architectural Digest, Dwell Magazine, Remodelista, National Geographic, and in Martha Stewart and O Magazines, and of working with clients including Clodagh Design, Commune Design, DIA Art Foundation, Eileen Fisher, Etsy Inc., Grace Farms, MKCA, and the Whitney Museum of Art. We are a certified Sustainable Business and donate to forest conservation and tree planting organizations to perpetuate the resource that makes our work possible.
“We can continue pushing our earth out of balance, with greenhouse gases accelerating each year, or we can regain balance by acknowledging that if we harm one species, one forest, one lake, this ripples through the entire complex web … The rest of the planet has been waiting patiently for us to figure that out. Making this transformation requires that humans reconnect with nature - the forests, the prairie, the oceans -instead of treating everything and everyone as objects for exploitation.”
― Suzanne Simard
The
Source
our orgin story, with a glimpse into how we started and why we do what we do
