AMERICAN GEMS
Check out these five American companies and makers who provide essential and charming items for your home.
This Georgia-based company has been making bricks since it opened in 1877, almost 150 years ago. They’ve been family owned and operated the entire time, for five generations.
The longevity of the company testifies not only to the family’s business skills, but the quality of the bricks they produce. “We are best known for our extensive line of tumbled brick,” says Sonja Tillman, director of marketing at Cherokee Brick. Tumbled brick is a new brick they’ve made to look old. “It’s one of the processes that Cherokee Brick does better than most of our competitors,” Sonja says. “We have a proprietary process that our brick goes through, making each brick look different.”
Did you know that bricks are a sustainable and eco-friendly building material? “Brick is made to last lifetimes, it never needs to be painted and it’s eco-friendly because we mine the clay from the earth,” Sonja says. “We fire it using methane from landfills, which keeps that methane from going into our atmosphere. When the brick doesn’t come out how we hoped, we crush it and put it back into the mix.”
These companies, big and small, are committed to quality
American-made products you’ll love for your home.
Our favorite uses for bricks in farmhouse style? Flooring, backsplashes, feature walls
and exterior siding.
The Polder family, with their 12 children, had always wanted to live a simpler life. “Our family dreamed of leaving behind the daily grind of the modern ‘American dream’ and getting back to what that originally meant,” says Rebekah Polder.
And they did just that. Starting in 2009, they opened Polder’s
Old World Market, which features the family’s handiwork of hand-carved wooden utensils such as cooking spoons, measuring spoons, spatulas and cutting boards. “Each piece of dreamware we make is hand-carved by our family, right on our farm in Virginia,” Rebekah says. “We make our utensils out of fallen hardwoods we salvage from the forest floor.” Having had success at local farmers’ markets and festivals, they soon opened an online shop.
Besides custom hand-carved cooking utensils, Polder’s Old World Market offers a collection of edible jams, honeys and other foods curated from other small farms around the country. “We are committed to supporting American families and businesses,” Rebekah says.
Want to learn how to care for wooden cooking utensils
and cutting boards? Visit poldersoldworldmarket.com/
pages/care-instructions.
This company based in Washington state has been around since 1957, producing efficient and affordable electric heating products for the home. Cadet heaters are room specific, which means you can save cost and energy efficiency by heating only the rooms you’re using, rather than the whole house. “A good metaphor would be a light switch,” says Heather Haynes of Dan Maze. “Turning heat off in rooms you’re not using saves money and electricity.” Some Cadet heaters also have programming capabilities and electric thermostats, which give you further control over the room comfort and energy efficiency.
One common problem in homes with central heating is that the temperature might not be consistent through the house. If you get the downstairs temperature right, the upstairs is too hot. “Cadet heaters give you the ability to control individual comfort in each room,” Heather says. “If there are cold rooms in the house, especially bedrooms or basements, everyone can control their own comfort level.”
Cadet heaters are also small and discrete, which allows them to go mostly unnoticed in the room. These aren’t the clunky, unsightly radiators that take up so much space— you can install a Cadet heater high or low on the wall, in your bathroom or even under your kitchen cabinets.
When artist and botanist Kathleen Morrone gave birth to her daughter, she decided a career change was in order. “I decided to give up my dream job in forestry research, which required lots of travel, for something that I could do at home while raising my daughter,” she says. She’d created herbariums as teaching tools in the past, so she started gathering plants to dry and got creative with the results. “I started creating prints of my herbariums after discovering the fragile dried plants were difficult to handle and share, and faded quickly when displayed in sunlight,” she says.
The result is Little Green Herbaria, the Etsy shop where Kathleen sells prints of the dried flora she collects. “I create the prints using flowers and plants that I collect locally, from my backyard garden to the forests that surround my Montana home,” she says. “Each flower is pressed and dried in my home studio using traditional herbarium techniques. I then arrange the dried flowers on paper to create each image.”
The prints look both vibrant and life-like. “You have to look twice to tell it is a print,” Kathleen says. She also creates silhouette-looking pieces with her dried plants. “I use digital editing techniques to create the blue cyanotype style prints out of the shapes of real pressed flowers,” she says. “My most popular item has been the Set of 6 Mountain Wildflowers. These are all native species to the western U.S. and show off some of the gorgeous colors of the mountains.”
Based in Phoenix, Arizona, Brooklyn Bedding produces mattresses, pillows and other bedding materials. The company started when two brothers who worked as liquidators, John and Rob Merwin, decided to find out how to make the best mattresses possible. They deconstructed mattresses and visited factories to learn, and eventually started making the product themselves.
“Every mattress is handcrafted at our wholly owned factory in Phoenix, Arizona—we even manufacture our own coils,”says Amy Dimond, director of brand marketing communications at Brooklyn Bedding. “We don’t believe in a one-size-fits-all solution: Each mattress and accessory addresses a very specific comfort, support and cooling need when it comes to quality sleep.”The company has showrooms in Arizona, but they ship nationally (and in Canada) and have a great 120-day trial period once you bring the mattress home.
One of the major questions couples often have is how to manage the mattress preferences of each person if they differ. “Couples may each have their own sleep profile, which makes compromising more difficult,” Amy says. “A (happy) medium firmness level really does manage to appease the overwhelming majority of couples, particularly if you choose a hybrid mattress. Hybrid mattresses, consisting of both foam and coil systems, are ideal for combining comfort and deep compression support.”