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Thinking about furnishing or refurnishing your home? If so, you may want to travel for style. Here’s why.

Away from the malls and outlets, you can think about your living space in a new way. Aesthetic and style influences often pour in from unexpected places, and suddenly you may realize a creative ballast that’s been missing in action in the hurly-burly of urban life. Plus, you’re probably traveling with your partner and in a different and relaxed environment, it’s often easier to see things from the similar perspectives that brought you together in the first place.

While many desirable domestic locations offer a bounty of decorative amenities, easy-to-access Vermont leads the pack when it comes to world-class, hand-crafted works of art that include furniture in styles that defy the cliché of ye olde rocking chair.

Vermont is big on trails. Think hiking and skiing, of course, but a Google search of Vermont Forest Heritage Tourism will get you the locations of some of the world’s finest furniture craftspeople. Their workshops are open to the public, presenting first-hand scrutinies of how magnificent the combination of head and hand can be when a passionate artist goes to work.

While you can literally tour workshops all over the Green Mountains, this particular amble singles out a coterie of companions, furniture makers and potters, all friends, but with very different styles, located in the greater Woodstock, Vermont region. Their infectious creativity may seem in odd contrast to the surrounding forests and pastures, let alone the digital age, but according to Miranda Thomas, whose hand-thrown and carved objets d’art are often requested for gifting by past and present White House residents, it’s precisely that commitment to slow living – like slow cooking – that allows them to invent and reinvent themselves and their work.

{joomplu:1551}Thomas and her furniture artist husband, Charles Shackleton, maintain studios at a repurposed woolen mill in Bridgewater. They first met while both were art students in England and later reconnected in Quechee, Vermont, at the workshops of Simon Pearce, whose hand-blown glass lamps and vases may well be a metaphor for Vermont’s simple and natural way of life.

Thomas said clients come into the ShackletonThomas low-keyed, tony space seeking advice. “They may have empty homes with packing crates and they’re terrified about where to begin,” she said.

Here visitors begin to understand, by stroking the silky finish of a bed or pouring over the details of a bowl, that art and craft are, in Thomas’ words, “about going where the machine can’t go but where the human hand can go. Everybody gets it about food – and slow food – but not about objects,” she said, underscoring that potters like her are an endangered species. “The arts schools are not teaching throwing.” She added, “A lot of people want to come to play with clay but what we do here is not play.”

The ShackletonThomas philosophy of art and life is to stay as sustainably close to the land as possible. This philosophy transcends into Charles Shackleton’s commitment to the importance of handwork in furniture design and his passion to breathe life into “a piece of furniture created out of locally grown wood, made by our own hands that [is] functional, beautiful and central to our lives. Something raw, bare-boned and ‘naked’ of any ego or cleverness.”

{joomplu:1555}When not turning out elegant pieces from his workshop, Shackleton engages the greater community, and those out-of-staters lucky enough to get a space, in an ongoing project he calls “The Naked Table” that encourages families to create their own simple kitchen table from locally harvested sugar maple. Over a two-day weekend, people pay for the privilege of spending time with Shackleton constructing their tables that are coated with a highly durable all-natural finish that’s created in part from whey (also locally sourced). The event often ends with a communal lunch around the collection of newly created tables under the shade of a historic covered bridge in downtown Woodstock. Shackleton is proud to point out that the carbon footprint of a typical table of the same size from a local box store, imported from a place such as Indonesia, is 11 tons of greenhouse gas, whereas this local “naked” table is more like .029 tons.

Several decades ago, another furniture maker, Josh Metcalf, mentored Charles Shackleton. Located on a back road in North Pomfret, Metcalf now creates commissioned-only furniture hearkening to fine English and Chinese antiques. Metcalf’s word-of-mouth business (not listed on the Heritage Trail) can be visited by calling for an appointment in advance. The drive goes through South Pomfret with its Teago General Store and an early 20th century stone and brick edifice, the Abbott Memorial Library, and on to North Pomfret with a small neo-classical town hall. Farther on the descent into Hewitt’s Corners is pastoral from a bird’s perspective. “If you can get there, it’s worth the visit,” said Metcalf, who added that the jaunt down a country road to his shop might just be for the intrepid back roader.

Coincidentally, another potter, Jeff Pentland, attended art school with Miranda Thomas. He then apprenticed to a company dating to 1880 that includes Windsor Castle among its clients. Today in Hartland, Vermont, he creates English-style (read durable), hand-thrown and wood-fired garden pottery in a traditional downdraft, 400 cubic foot kiln where three days and three cords of wood later temperatures reach 2100 degrees Fahrenheit in 12 hours of firing.

To visit these workshops, telephone or email in advance for hours of operation or visit the websites for information:

Josh Metcalf

This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it ; 802.457.3933; www.joshmetcalf.com

Pentland Pottery

This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it ; 802.436.9122;

www.pentlandpottery.tripod.com

ShackletonThomas

This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it ; 802.672.5175;

www.shackletonthomas.com

You just may want to bring room and bed measurements with you to Vermont.

(On a side note, if you wander into the Chicago Botanic Garden you may well sit on one of the 300 commissioned garden benches that come from ShackletonThomas.)