One Finish, Three Shops

Some of the makers on this floor will tell you the year they started, the name of the man who started it and which of his grandchildren runs the sanding room. Troyer Design Company will not, because there is nobody to ask. There is no consumer website, no about page, no founder’s photograph. What there is, is a long catalog of dining furniture built in American hardwoods by Amish and Mennonite hands, moving out through a network of dealers.

That is not unusual. It is closer to the norm. Most Amish shops do not brand anything: no badge on the drawer, no name burned into the underside of the top. The tag on the showroom floor carries the retailer’s name, and the shop that actually built the piece stays anonymous to the person who ends up eating off it for thirty years. It is one of the genuinely odd things about this trade, and it is the reason a showroom that knows its builders is worth more than one that does not. We can tell you whose bench a piece came off even when the piece cannot.

What their catalog does tell you is that they are a dining shop first. Tables, chairs and full dining collections, named for American places — Acadia, Alpine, Rainier, Washington, Tucson — with a smaller run of occasional tables alongside. The Tucson we carry is theirs, and in their own range it is drawn to pair with a chair called the Evans. In the room on this site it is sitting with seating from a different shop entirely, which is allowed and is very often the better answer.

We would rather introduce a maker by name and by however many generations they have been at it. Where we can, we do. Here, what we can vouch for is the wood, the work and the fact that it turns up correct. Come and put your hands on the top.