An interview with Heywood-Wakefield co-owner, Tom Belletete. Part 1 of 3: The construction of heirloom-quality furniture.

Tom and his son, Joe, working on a prototype of the M 2411 Cosmo TV Stand.

Tom Belletete is a 3rd generation Massachusetts woodworker, furniture designer, electrical engineer and, since 2022, the CEO and co-owner  of Heywood-Wakefield.  William Doyle-Capitman, Heywood-Wakefield’s Director of Marketing & Sales, interviewed Tom in February, 2025.  In this excerpt, Tom discusses the construction of Heywood-Wakefield furniture, the attributes of the wood we use, why so much vintage furniture has survived and the ways in which the new furniture is more robust.

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William: As a furniture maker and an engineer, what is special about building Heywood-Wakefield furniture?  Are there particularly challenging parts of it?

Tom: Well, to start with what is challenging about it, getting the quality of lumber we require is difficult.  The wood we use, Northern Yellow Birch, is a hardwood from the Northeast.  The sapwood of this tree is what yields the blond color of Heywood-Wakefield furniture.  Because of the finish we use, which is basically transparent, we have to purchase a much higher grade of lumber than the original company did to ensure our boards are all that light-colored sapwood rather than the darker heartwood.  The original finishes, Wheat and Champagne, weren’t paint finishes but they were very opaque, and because of that, the grain didn’t show through.  They could buy lower-quality lumber that was a combination of light sap wood and dark heart wood and cover it up.  Our main current finish, Amber, has a lot of advantages over the old finishes - it’s much harder and more moisture and light resistant - but it doesn’t hide anything. 

So, for us, we have to be really careful about the lumber we use. It’s more expensive, because a lower percentage of the boards meet our standards.  We still get plenty of lumber in each order that isn’t 100% sapwood, but we can use that for the parts that aren’t visible, like drawer sides or interior parts.  A lot of our work is parsing through our lumber deliveries and grading our boards to make sure that the wood for the visible parts of the furniture is really beautiful and uniform, but also reducing waste by sorting the structurally strong but visually imperfect wood to make into interior parts.

William: Tell me more about Northern Yellow Birch.  It’s not a wood people usually associate with fine furniture.

Tom: It’s a non-threatened and sustainable species, in part because it’s pretty fast-growing for hardwood.  It grows all over New England and grows better the further north you go. Most of ours comes from Northern Maine.  When the winters are colder, the tree grows slower and the growth rings are tighter and stronger.  It's not really known as a premium furniture wood and back when Heywood-Wakefield started using it, it was definitely cheaper than Hard Maple, which looks similar.  But when you’re being selective with the lumber and buying the premium boards with the highest percentage of sap wood, which is just a part of a tree that’s already smaller than Maple, it’s actually more expensive.

In terms of how it compares to other hardwoods, it’s actually harder than cherry or walnut, though not as hard as Hard Maple.  It takes a stain much better than Hard Maple.  Hard maple is notorious for being blotchy - it absorbs stain unevenly because of its grain structure. Birch is a little softer and the grain structure is more uniform than hard maple, which improves how it absorbs a stain and yields a more even finish.  It also makes it easier to work with than Hard Maple; it cuts nicely and sands nicely.  It also steam bends well, which is important because many of our parts require steam bending to achieve their shape while staying strong.  

Tom (right) and James (left) planing a shipment of Northern Yellow Birch lumber.

William: Tell me about steam-bending.  How do you use it in Heywood-Wakefield furniture?

Tom: Well, if you want to create a curve out of wood, there’s two ways to do it.  The first is to take a big piece of wood and cut the curve out of it.  That wastes a lot of wood and also yields a piece that, depending on the shape, might not be strong.  Wood is always stronger along the grain, lengthwise, and weaker between the grain, widthwise.  The second way to make a curve is to steam bend the wood.  This is more economical because you aren’t cutting out so much wood, and it’s much stronger because it preserves the structural integrity of the lengthwise grain.

Several parts of our dining chairs, like the crown [the backrest], hoop [the horseshoe-shaped piece that attaches under the back and sides of the seat] and back legs, are steam bent.  That’s one of the few things we don’t do in-house because it’s really an art unto itself and requires a lot of specialized equipment.  We work with Sawyer Bentwood, which is a really old [founded in 1801] family-run business in Vermont.  I pick the wood to ensure we’re using the best-looking pieces and I bring it up to them.  They put the wood into steam chambers and once it’s absorbed enough moisture, it becomes pliable.  Then they use hydraulic presses and hand clamps to press the wood against a form.  It takes a day or more to cure but when it’s done, you have the shape you want with all of the strength you want.  We pick them up and then do some hand-shaping and sanding before assembling them into the finished piece.

William: Besides steam bending, what are the other distinctive or challenging parts of how Heywood-Wakefield furniture is constructed?

Tom: One of the distinctive parts of Heywood-Wakefield’s style - as this is a small but very important detail - is that none of our case goods [dressers, cabinets, nightstands] have overhangs on the tops or the bottoms.  The entire piece flows together smoothly.  That can be a challenge because wood is a natural product that expands and contracts with humidity, but it does so in a specific way - it moves width-wise but not length-wise.  So we have to be cognizant of that fact when we design and build things.  So the way we achieve the uninterrupted curves of our pieces in a way that’s dimensionally stable, as in, won’t expand or contract over time and ruin the look, is by building tops, sides and bottoms with all the grain running in the same direction.  This isn’t something that people may consciously notice, but it pleases the eye and makes it so that if a piece expands or contracts, the junctions and joints between parts of the furniture will move at the same rate and remain stable relative to each other, and the piece will continue looking as it should.  It’s important to point out that that is a solution specific to solid wood furniture construction.  If you’re dealing with plywood and veneers, that’s not an issue because plywood is designed to be dimensionally stable.  Building with solid wood is, of course, more expensive, but it also requires a lot more thought in the engineering.

The C 4709 Catherine Server.

 

Tom: Another distinctive part of Heywood-Wakefield construction is our use of French dovetails to build all of our drawers.  These are also called sliding dovetails and they’re a really elegant and, from what I’ve seen, a rare way to affix a drawer front to a drawer box.  A lot of furniture companies will use plywood to make a four-sided drawer box and then affix a piece of solid wood to the front.  We build all of our drawer boxes from solid wood and using this technique, we only need four pieces in total.  The front piece has two dovetail-shaped vertical grooves and each of the side pieces as a dovetail-shaped tenon.  The tenons slide into the grooves of the front pieces.  It’s very clean and elegant.  It’s slender and saves weight and, because each side of the drawer front is so solidly connected to the drawer sides, it prevents cupping and warping and keeps the drawer box straight and true, which prevents binding.  Drawers built this way are beautiful and they work really well over time.

A drawer side sliding into a drawer face using a French dovetail joint.


William: There’s a huge second-hand market for vintage Heywood Wakefield furniture.  Do you think so much of it still exists because of the way it was constructed or because so much of it was produced?

Tom: I think it’s both.  Heywood Wakefield was one of the largest furniture manufacturers of its time, so they produced an enormous amount of furniture.  But it was also built to last.  Today, people see it as a premiere brand, but back then, it was just well-made, mass-produced American furniture.  It’s important to understand how the furniture industry of the first half of the 20th century was different.  Back then, more companies were making high-quality furniture.  The lower or cheaper end of the furniture market we have today, from Wayfair or Ikea, didn’t exist from a supply perspective.  Cheap furniture from abroad wasn’t produced and shipped en masse.  The other part of it, which is sort of the inverse of the supply situation, is that demand was different, meaning people’s expectations and usage of furniture was different.  Back then, people saved up to buy a bedroom set, and that was their set for life.  Today, people move more often and replace furniture frequently.  Most furniture today is optimized around a price point, not necessarily optimized around durability.

But even Heywood Wakefield had cheap knockoffs.  There was a brand called Stardust which made cheaper versions of Heywood Wakefield furniture and sold them through department stores like Macy’s.  People still confuse Stardust pieces with real Heywood Wakefield today.  Stardust was like 25% cheaper, but they were cutting corners.

William: And what about the actual construction—what made Heywood Wakefield pieces so durable?

Tom: Besides how they built furniture with the grain running in the same direction, there are a few other reasons.  With the pieces that have drawers, like cabinets and dressers and nightstands, a big reason they’ve lasted is because of the way the drawers were made.  They used French dovetail joints to affix the drawer fronts, which hold up really well over time, in part because they help prevent the drawer frames from warping.  And the large pieces with drawers also used floating frame construction, which is the idea that there’s a frame inside the overall case and the drawers are affixed to the internal frame with mortise and tenon rather than glues and screws, so that when the overall piece expands and contracts, the frame holding the drawers is a bit insulated from that movement and less likely to warp, which in turn means the drawers are less likely to bind.  The result is a piece that continues working well for much longer than it would with cheaper construction methods.

The floating frame construction of our M 529 Encore Triple Dresser.

William: Are there ways in which the new Heywood Wakefield furniture is better than the vintage furniture from an engineering or construction perspective?

Tom: We’ve stayed true to the aesthetics but there are areas where we saw an opportunity to improve on the construction or assembly techniques.  And actually, the biggest change is the most visible one: the finish.  It’s objectively a lot better.  We use a modern catalyzed finish, which is way tougher than the nitrocellulose lacquer they used to use.  It’s the same idea as a two-part epoxy - you have a base and a catalyst, and when you mix them, there’s a chemical reaction that causes the molecules to link and harden.  So there’s a limited working time, and it takes some time to cure, but when it does it’s really hard.  It stands up really well to moisture and light.  With the original finishes, if you put a glass of water on them without a coaster, you’d get a ring.  If you put a book down on a surface and, if the sun was consistently shining on that surface, it would darken and you’d get a light spot under the book.  The new finish is also much safer to work with from a health and environmental perspective.  The old stuff - the nitrocellulose lacquer - was really very toxic. [Click here to see a video of Tom spraying Amber finish onto an M 546 Kohinoor desk.]

Tom: Another big set of changes is how we engineer the parts to fit together.  Basically, we’ve made it so they can be assembled and disassembled many times without becoming loose or wobbly.  The components of old Heywood-Wakefield were often assembled with screws directly into the wood.  That’s good the first time you take it apart and put it back together, maybe the second time, but by the third time, you’ve probably stripped the hole and the leg, or whatever, is loose.  So we’ve switched over to having a dowel to align the leg, and then a bolt that goes into a threaded insert or a t-nut. That’s great because you can just tighten that thing down and it’s going to get tighter and tighter as you screw it in.  Basically, you’re taking a bolt in and out of a metal insert, versus a screw going into wood.  The other thing we changed that is a real improvement is the way we attach dining table legs. We use a quarter-inch, five-by-five steel plate. The leg attaches to the plate using a barrel nut, and then the plate attaches to the table base using t-nuts. So you’re bolting metal to metal, and the leg is attached to that solid steel plate. Those legs don’t wobble or wiggle.

Tom: I think part of the context here is that the old stuff was usually delivered completely assembled, which kind of made sense when you think of a retail network where there was probably a local furniture showroom that could drive your purchase to your house in a box truck.  But since we sell direct-to-consumer over the phone and internet and we have to ship things in a safe and compact and economical way, pretty much everything we make is engineered to flat pack or at least have removable legs.  People move more often than they used to and we want our furniture to keep working as well in your fourth house as it did in your first house.

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Next month, we will publish the second part of this interview in which Tom discusses how he joined Heywood-Wakefield, his design inspirations, his approach to designing new furniture and his aspirations for the future of Heywood-Wakefield.