Who We Are

Family Hearth Workshop is a family making things with other families in mind. For now, we are a husband and wife team, though as our children get older they’ll be helping out, too.

What We Do

We make all kinds of things, mostly out of wood.

We want to make things that we’d use ourselves. Things that we’d decorate our home with and things we’d use often.

We like things that are timeless and beautiful, and we hope that we can reflect these things, even in a small way, in our work.

Most of our products are made to order though we sometimes have inventory. We don’t sell directly from our website yet, but we are working on it. We also have a page on Etsy. You can also find us on Facebook, where we sell locally in West Michigan.

Why We Do It

When you see the word “hearth”, what comes to mind? A fireplace? A store with the word in the name, used to try and sound old and worn?

The hearth was once the center of a home. It’s where families gathered together to stay warm, where they worked together, told stories together, cooked food together, and spent their lives together. As C.R. Wiley puts it:

… pre-modern households served the gods of the hearth. And connecting the household to the gods were the ancestors who lived in the lower regions of the divine pantheon. A house then was part of something very large. It was the low rung of a ladder that went all the way to the top of the cosmos.

 

He writes in another article:

Once upon a time the economy lived at home. Households were for work and the people who lived in them were put to work.
…
in the beginning it was all there—the whole economy. I put it this way because an economy is more than work, it is the order of the household.

…
But almost no one thinks of an economy in these terms today. For most people that economy doesn’t live at home, it makes its abode in the open market.

 

We started the Family Hearth Workshop for several reasons, but the chief reason was that we wanted to build something together as a family. Rather than seeing our home as merely a place of recreation and rest, we wanted to also see it as a place of fruitful work.

We hope that beyond offering products for others to enjoy, we can offer our experience in building something like this to other families. You may not want to start a business, but maybe a garden. Maybe a productive hobby. Eventually, we’d like to help other families learn to work together, and building this business from the ground up is our first step.