Heywood-Wakefield Keeps American Furniture Making Alive

The CM 388 C Biscayne Collection Club Chair, M 992 End Table with Shelf, and M 2410 Cosmo Coffee Table.

The M 197 Butterfly Drop-Leaf Dining Table and M 154 A and C Dog Biscuit dining chairs.

A 1950 advertisement for Heywood-Wakefield’s Modern collection.

A finisher polishing a M 321 Bookcase in the Gardner, Mass., factory in 1949.

A Portland, Ore., furniture shop advertising the brand in 1951.

The M 392 Square Cocktail Table with Drawer.

The M 530 StyleMaster Bed and M 1528 Encore Nightstand.

Furniture maker and CEO Tom Belletete inspecting a M 1553 Cat’s Eye Dining Chair in Winchendon, Mass.

The M 546 Kohinoor Desk and C 3379 Vanity Seat.

The rebirth of Massachusetts furniture company Heywood-Wakefield doesn’t actually start in Massachusetts. It starts in Miami Beach in the 1970s and ’80s with a pair of New York-born design preservationists, Andrew Capitman and Margaret Doyle, who became intrigued with the company’s designs, history, quality, and ubiquity while working to preserve the Art Deco District in Miami Beach.

During the renovation of a series of art deco hotels, the couple came upon rooms still furnished in Heywood-Wakefield pieces from thirty and forty years prior—mini time capsules that illustrated design du jour’s transition from art deco to midcentury modern.

As it turned out, Heywood-Wakefield had been present for more than one style shift. Levi Heywood, an early innovator in industrial-scale furniture making, cofounded Heywood Brothers in Gardner—aka Chair City—in 1826. Those makers merged with a Boston-based company led by Cyrus Wakefield, who invented techniques for turning rattan reeds into wicker furniture, in 1897, and Heywood-Wakefield was born.

It would go on to become one of the largest furniture manufacturers in America, crafting everything from sofas to baby carriages to railroad seats, before rising costs and overseas competition forced it to declare bankruptcy in 1980.

Enter Capitman and Doyle. In 1992, after acquiring the rights to the Heywood-Wakefield name, the couple, along with furniture executive Leonard Riforgiato, restarted production of vintage designs. Third-generation Massachusetts furniture maker Tom Belletete, who got
his start sweeping floors in his family’s workshop when he was a kid, joined the team in 2012 and was named CEO ten years later.

Belletete and his eight-person team, which includes his wife, son, and, occasionally, his eighty-nine-year-old mother, craft forty-six archival and ten new designs from a 34,000-square-foot workshop in Winchendon, ten miles from Gardner. Capitman and Doyle’s son, William Doyle-Capitman, serves as the company’s director of marketing and sales.

Most of the lumber used to create the furniture—largely northern yellow birch—comes from within 100 miles of Winchendon. Vermont company Sawyer Bentwood does all of the steam bending, and Belletete takes pride in training students from a nearby technical high school, four of whom he’s since hired.

“What a gift to pass on what I learned from my dad and uncle to the next generation, individuals motivated to make this their career,” says Belletete.

Though Heywood-Wakefield has a trade program, Doyle-Capitman says most items are sold direct to consumers, primarily baby boomers with a strong sense of nostalgia and Gen X vintage enthusiasts.

“We interact with every customer,” Doyle-Capitman explains. Belletete continues, “Items ship with a card that tells you who in our workshop built the piece. We’ve had people reach out with new orders and request they are built by the same person, which just makes everyone’s day.”
Heywood-Wakefield, Winchendon, Mass., heywoodwakefield.com(opens in new tab)

Dining room photograph by Alexandra Rowley. Archival photography courtesy of the Levi Heywood Memorial Library and Heywood-Wakefield