From Portland, With Love
Schoolhouse started two decades ago in a century-old factory building in an industrial section of Portland, Oregon. There, we made our first light—a vintage inspired fixture with a big, milk glass shade. We’ve been designing and manufacturing high-quality lighting ever since.
To celebrate our roots, we’ve gathered our six most iconic lighting families and created Benchmade, a line we continue to handcraft in our hometown.
The lights were drawn by our in-house design team. Many of the brass, glass, and wood parts are produced domestically (with oak, the best-quality can be found in America). For some of the parts we source, such as cased glass shades, there's better quality overseas. Once we have parts made to our specs, the rest of the work happens back in Portland.
Just steps from where each piece was dreamed up in our offices, our factory team finishes them by hand—by buffing and lacquering or by scuffing and painting. We’ve found that doing all this in-house gives us a broader range of color and finishes and enables us to control all the details—to make a better product. These last steps require years of expertise and a careful human eye.
Designing next door to where Benchmade is manufactured means we can prototype using real components and tweak the details—such as color and dimmer function—with the people who will be assembling the final product. It also means we get to have fun: Our design team was so taken with Ray’s short bulbous shade that they turned it upside down. And so, Teig was born.
Simple designs are not simple to accomplish. Benchmade is both simple and sophisticated–our aim is for each of these fixtures to become a Schoolhouse classic.
“Working so closely with the people who are going to make the final product is extremely rare these days, but it’s an asset to our design process. We can get instant feedback, down to a specific screw, which makes the final design—the one that lights up your home—all the more special.”
— Katie Elliott, Schoolhouse Vice President of Design