Fourth-generation woodworker, Ros Broughton, began his career as a cabinetmaker doing high-end projects for high-end clients around the San Francisco Bay Area. But it wasn’t long before he began to tire of working only for the richest of the rich. As a custom cabinetmaker, he reflects, “We got to do some incredible stuff but at the end of the day only a few people would ever see or enjoy it.” With an eye to bringing good design and quality craftsmanship to more people he began Fyrn (pronounced “fearn”), a furniture brand with an emphasis on craft, in 2016 along with cofounder David Charne.
A Fourth-Generation Woodworker
Raised on a farm in northeastern Connecticut (affectionately known as the state’s “quiet corner”), Broughton’s great grandfather helped revive the Hitchcock Chair company, which in the middle to the 19th century was an early mass producer of quality furniture. Broughton credits that family connection for nurturing his own love of woodworking, craft, and Yankee efficiency.
Where the Hitchcock company was innovative for mass producing interchangeable chair parts, Broughton’s company would find its own fertile ground in combining the warmth of wood and the strength of metal. Broughton developed a system that uses brackets made of CNC-milled aluminum to connect the wooden legs, seat, and back. Inside the wooden frame, hidden from view, is another metal joint that connects the wooden stretchers and legs to provide strength. Broughton explains that “because of the way chairs get used, sat on, and moved around, they’re almost never on a perfectly level surface, so they need to be able to flex and bend and be durable.” The patented hardware the Fyrn team developed allows just the right amount of flex and lets users replace individual parts easily, should they ever break.
