The standard came first, and it came from our mother.

She shopped vintage in an era when that meant patience rather than provenance. Paul McCobb. Heywood-Wakefield. Pieces we ate dinner at for years before we knew whose hands had made them. What registered wasn't the name. It was the weight of a drawer pulling open, the way a joint held, the clean line of a piece that knew exactly what it was. We were learning an aesthetic before we knew there was one to learn.

We opened in two thousand eight with home accessories — eight to ten pop-up shops in high-end malls. Vintage found its way in gradually, first in the small things, because that was the language we'd been raised speaking. Then Israel began studying furniture in earnest, mornings at a time, and the small things stopped being enough.

By twenty-twelve the stores were closed and we were online entirely, sourcing and restoring designer mid-century from the fifties, sixties and seventies. Furniture mostly, but art and vintage lighting too. It's an education you can't get any other way. You learn what survives fifty years and what only appears to.

Very little made today does.

In twenty-fourteen we partnered with Craft Associates as their marketing arm. Israel's fluency in mid-century design made it an unusually good fit, as did our own visual sensibility. We already knew the makers, the periods, the details worth arguing about — and we've never been shy about having an opinion on design.

Around the same time, an interior designer in Colorado found The Swanky Abode on Instagram. Her name was Greta. She and Israel married a few years later and started a family, and her design background eventually turned from specifying furniture to drawing it.

Bertu Home wasn't new. It had existed quietly since the pop-up years — our sister's small line of home accessories, agate coasters, a table, a few benches, briefly even a skateboard company. As vintage took over, Bertu simply went quiet. Greta didn't start it so much as wake it up. Bertu today is contemporary and entirely in her image, held to the identical bar.

Two houses. Different hands, different eras, one standard.

In the years since we've designed some phenomenal commercial spaces, grown as a family and as a family of brands, and found a position that's genuinely our own. We make the best modern American furniture money can buy, and we sell it directly. No wholesalers, no showroom margin, no chain of hands each taking a cut. The same piece elsewhere would cost you twice as much.

We deliver what we say we'll deliver. We care about the experience before you've had a reason to call us about it.

We're grateful for where we are. We're excited about the people who work with us now, the customers who've found us, and the potential of everything still ahead. And we look forward to serving you.