Meet the Amish Makers Shaking Up the Furniture Market

“Our focus for Abner Henry is nature—nature is perfect in its scale—and so we can use that as inspiration, and then a lot of old architectural-style buildings like The Met,” says Ernest Hershberger, who debuted the Abner Henry x The Met Facade Collection at the High Point Furniture Market this past spring. “It’s scaled perfectly, it’s styled in these different styles, and then it’s completely fresh. It’s not a mimic of something else that has already been done.”

For the seven-piece array, Abner Henry translated the building’s majestic arches into a gently swooping dining table, the chéneau (ornamental gutter) designed by Richard Morris Hunt into a sculptural chair, and a carved recess into an elegant shelf cabinet. “The Amish brand of furniture is so strong, that it points you into more traditional, Mission, Shaker, categories,” says Hershberger. “I don’t know how many people came back into the showroom twice, some of them even three times, and said, we can’t find anything like this the market. What do you do and how you doing this?”

Also introduced during spring market at High Point was Abner Henry’s collaboration with New York designer Sasha Bikoff, who is known for her exuberant colorful interiors. Together, they created a collection that puts a contemporary spin on Memphis with striking pieces like the Elouise vanity, a curvaceous frame rendered in electric Barbie pink, or the Darius armoire, with two-tone wood doors that open to a electric interior of cobalt, red, green, and yellow hues. Brightly colored shapes defined the electric Jacquie bench or the show-stopping Dino table where a selection of legs in whimsical shapes and shades supported a glass top without any hint of how they were adhered using an entirely new technique unseen anywhere else in the industry.

“The shapes are fun, but I can make you a circle and a triangle—that that was the easy part. The challenging part was the color selection and the color creation because that’s not a paint—that’s actually coloring in our top-coat system that gives you the full protection,” says Hershberger. “The Sasha collection is not only very cool, and we love working with Sasha because she’s so creative, of course it also makes people realize that Abner Henry is Amish, but we are not building your traditional Amish furniture, because we have the ability to create whatever anybody puts their mind to.”

Abner Henry had their breakout moment when it premiered its first seven-piece collection with The Met at High Point in October 2023. That limited-edition group reinterpreted masterpieces from the museum’s art collection into spectacular tables, mirrors, and case goods. The gentle ruffles of a ballerina in Edgar Degas’ 1874 painting The Dance Class begat the Pirouette console, where undulating wood panels nestled in a patinated metal frame support a glass top with an astounding cantilever. The gold bursting from the canvas in Vincent Van Gogh‘s Sunflowers informed the Verlang cocktail table made with jagged metal petals surrounding a gleaming gold core, the entire form supporting a glass top.

“That Met collection was a four year journey of intense research and development of techniques that had never before been done in the woodworking industry,” Hershberger says, highlighting particularly groundbreaking works, like the Coralie cocktail table that boasts a heavenly blue glass top inspired by Auguste Renoir’s 1883 painting Seashore, or the unique frame of the Ventana standing mirror, that nods to the circa-1650 portrait of Juan de Pareja by Diego Velázquez.

As a designer, Hershberger is adamant that Abner Henry not get pigeon-holed into one specific look, so the company builds everything from traditional wood furniture to forward-thinking contemporary designs. Tapping into other makers in the Amish community, they utilize a “cluster industry” leaning onto others in the community who do glassblowing and metalwork to help construct their furniture. “When you buy an Abner Henry piece, you are actually creating a job for probably, at a minimum, six other shops,” he says. “You’re buying from a community of woodworkers and artisans that are tied together with Abner Henry, because I can’t be the absolute best and in in glassblowing, and I can’t be the absolute best and metalworking, and I can’t be the absolute best in drawer fronts.”

Hershberger started his career early, leaving school after eighth grade in the Amish tradition to apprentice in a trade. His mother’s family had been constructing high-end custom kitchen cabinets since 1918, and Hershberger followed in their footsteps, taking a deep interest in the lean manufacturing process. After he got married, his wife’s family worked in retail, operating stores dedicated to quilts, harnesses, shoes, and eventually in 1990, furniture. The melding of both experiences guided Hersberger to launch Abner Henry in 2008 at a time when a lot of American furniture makers were forced out of business during the economic downturn. “I just simply saw an opening,” he says. “I brought this high-end custom kitchen cabinet philosophy into the furniture world and it has been absolutely fascinating adventure for me.”

Today, Abner Henry constructs custom furniture for designers all around the globe utilizing ten different species of wood, with 600 different finish options. Working alongside four of his sons, including Lavern, he’s hoping these more recent introductions open people’s eyes to fortitude of Amish craftsmanship. “We build it, assemble it, finish it, and we are confident that it’s going to go into the next generation,” he says.