Luxury Lighting | Vermont’s Hubbardton Forge Shines Bright

Some 1,700 miles from Vermont there stands a showroom in Dallas that’s a testament to modern artisan craftsmanship from the Green Mountain State. Like its sister showrooms in Las Vegas and High Point, North Carolina, it’s filled with the wares of Castleton-based luxury lighting manufacturer Hubbardton Forge. There are sconces that glitter, pendants that gleam, chandeliers whose lines dance and swoop.

But the most popular item on display here is a homely, unpolished hulk of black industrial metal, tucked into a corner by the entryway. It is a forge—it is the forge, the one used by George Chandler and Reed Hampton, two young UVM graduates, when they founded Hubbardton Forge in 1974 and began turning out handwrought candlesticks, fireplace accessories, and eventually lighting fixtures. And to current CEO Maria Mullen, it is priceless.

“We are not like everybody else. We don’t want to be like everybody else,” she says. “And the best way to do that is to remember our history and our founders—who we are and where we came from. We try to keep that history front and center all the time.”

Having arrived at the company in 2020 as chief operating officer, then stepping into the CEO spot the following year, Mullen is relatively new to the Hubbardton Forge tradition but not to the world of handcrafting. Her grandfather was an expert woodworker in New York City who was known for his custom cabinetry and furniture; both her architect father and her uncle worked with him. “I grew up around that, and I always loved the smell of woodworking and being down at the shop,” Mullen says. “Subconsciously, I guess, it somehow got under my skin.”

Her own career path veered at first toward fashion, including jobs at brands such as Versace and Bruno Magli. But it was after she signed on with Murray Feiss, a family-owned company famed for making decorative residential lighting, that she “kind of fell in love with the lighting industry. To me it seemed like it was still fashion, but for your home.” By the time Hubbardton Forge recruited her, Mullen had been leading her own lighting design company, Kalizma Home, for six years.

Today, Mullen and her senior team oversee some 250 designers, artisans, engineers, and staff at what is now one of the biggest and oldest commercial forges in the country. And while the founders, Chandler and Hampton, transitioned out of the company more than a decade ago, their spirit remains. “This was two guys in a barn with a vision, and they did it their way,” Mullen says. “They didn’t follow the conventions of the lighting industry at the time—they went more on feel, and art, and loving the product that they were putting out. And they absolutely always focused on quality.

“That all still resides here. We really have that feeling in our building of what we call ‘the pride of the forge.’”

Put into practice, that means everything at Hubbardton Forge’s 100,000-square-foot factory in Castleton is made to order and crafted by hand. All the work—from initial designs to shipping the finished product—happens right on-site.

Even in assembling the ingredients of its creations, the company sticks close to a “made in Vermont” ethos. Its lighting and home decor have incorporated, for instance, graceful handblown glass from Simon Pearce and Burlington’s AO Glass, Vermont wood and stone from Maple Landmark and Fair Haven’s House of Slate, and lighting technology from LEDdynamics in Randolph. Working with local partners like these not only makes for a smaller carbon footprint, but also gives Hubbardton Forge a big advantage in the design process, Mullen says.

“Collaborating is so much easier when you can go right down the road to meet with the slate manufacturer or the wood manufacturer and say, ‘No, this thickness would be better than this thickness,’ and ‘We need something more like this shape,’” Mullen says. “Because again, we’re not doing cookie-cutter things here. And sometimes just explaining what our crazy ideas are can be challenging.”

Those crazy ideas—say, a custom-ordered chandelier measuring a whopping nine feet in diameter—begin with Hubbardton Forge’s design team, who all come from different backgrounds, including engineering and even jewelry design. They then work shoulder to shoulder with the company’s artisans and engineers, welders and forgers and finishers, to bring the concept to life. “We’re not sending a drawing off to a faraway land and getting a prototype that we may or may not like,” Mullen says. “We’re all putting our two cents in, one way or another.”

These days, Hubbardton Forge’s designs can be spotted in such prestigious locations as Las Vegas’s MGM Grand and Luxor hotels; closer to home, more than 100 of its sconces, chandeliers, and pendants lend sparkle to Stratton Mountain Base Lodge. The company has also notched a number of accolades, most recently winning the lighting fixtures category at the international home-industry competition known as the ARTS Awards.

Yet as Mullen sees it, making this heritage Vermont company a household name isn’t what motivates those who work there (though a designer once joked to her, “I’m tired of us being a ‘nice surprise’ to people… I want them to know who we are!”). The goal instead is to create something that people will want to keep for a lifetime.

“If you buy something beautiful, it stays with you,” she says. “We want people to have that attraction, that feeling when they will look at our product that they can’t live without it. It’s not just plugging a hole; it’s not something you’ll trash at some point down the road. It’s going to become an heirloom.” hubbardtonforge.com

Ready, Set, Glow

Handcrafted lighting that lets New England’s artisan tradition shine through.

1. modernmaine

Along with eye-catching geometric shapes and the quiet beauty of wood grain, Julie Morringello’s pendant lights are saturated with a sense of place. Trained in both industrial and furniture design, Morringello—who has been honored as a Society of Arts and Crafts artist of the year—crafts them all in her studio on Maine’s Deer Isle and sources the materials as close by as possible. No wonder her lights were chosen to warm the interiors of the Stonington Opera House and local roastery 44 North Coffee, where they glow with the unmistakable warmth of home. Stonington, ME; modernmaine.com

2.Janna Ugone & Co.

A graduate of the Massachusetts College of Art & Design, Ugone designs lighting that mixes lively artistic inspiration—birds and butterflies, native plants, maps, journal drawings—with heirloom-weight details like hand-modeled pewter finials and honed slate bases. Visitors are welcome to stop by Ugone’s studio, set in a historic mill building, to see her team of artisans at work, browse the showroom and outlet, and check out the Lamp Bar, filled with lampshades ready to give any old base that extra bit of soul. Easthampton, MA; jannaugoneandco.com

3.Providence Art Glass

The passion of two award-winning artists, Rebecca Zhukov and Terence Dubreuil, not only fires their exquisite lighting creations—colorful, fantastical hand-blown glass pendants and chandeliers—but also extends to the community at large. Last year they founded the 20,000-square-foot Blackstone River Glass Center, which houses their state-of-the-art glass studio along with providing a place for other artists and members of the public to learn and create in a variety of disciplines, and for the tradition of hand-making to live on. Cumberland, RI; providenceartglass.com