Take a Virtual Tour
of the store
– Kerry Triffin
Steve Berger: Forget the Cows
Vermont woodworker left the farm to explore the boundaries of furniture art.
As a farm boy in Nappanee, Indiana, Steve Berger’s first try at woodworking was a gun case he made in shop class. He enjoyed the work, but he couldn’t pursue it—he had too much work milking the family cows.
It wasn’t until a few decades later, in the mid-1980s, that Steve began building furniture professionally for a woodshop in northern Indiana. “They did reproduction-style furniture, mostly hand-crafted,” Berger says. “I’ll tell ya, I learned a lot.”
As Kerry Triffin explains it, the craft signaled a turning point in Steve’s life.
“At a certain point he said to his dad, ‘I’m sorry, but I just can’t do the cows anymore.’ He apprenticed at good furniture shops. Then little by little he started buying very serious old woodworking equipment at auction prices, built himself a workshop behind his house, and began to run his own business,” Kerry says.
These days, Steve runs a one-man woodshop in rural Vermont. And every piece he makes is sold at Kerry’s store, Fairhaven Furniture in New Haven, Connecticut.
“Steve is one of our greatest furniture-making resources,” Kerry says. “He truly has the smarts, the skills, the creativity, and the enthusiasm to do anything he sets himself to. Steve, through our association I believe, has moved past being simply a fine maker of furniture into exploring his boundaries as an artist.”
Every two weeks, Steve drives down I-91 with a load of new pieces for Fairhaven Furniture. As a custom woodworker, he receives drawings made by the store’s designers of pieces designed for a customer’s unique specifications. Occasionally Steve will meet with a customer to learn exactly how they’d like their home and furniture to look.
“People ask me what style I like to make. I say I have no preference, I like to make a whole lot of things so I don’t get tired of any one thing. It’s more important for me to make the customer happy,” Berger says. “I like more freeform style—live edge style—taking a board and trying to make a piece of furniture with it as it is.
“Fairhaven Furniture is different than any other stores around. At most furniture stores, whether in Connecticut or Vermont it’s usually factory-made stuff. It’s either that or nothing. When you see something in his store, if you want to change it, they will.”
Adds Kerry, “As I see it, Steve’s a man on a journey, the actual destination of which is not yet known. But it’s clear to me that whatever he produces along the way will impress and inspire.”
