Curvaceous Craftsmanship: What Nature Provides, Rustic Gardens Designs

Lorie and Troy Brown’s betrothal was the start of something beautiful — and not just the relationship of a lifetime. The arbor they built for their wedding, which later stood in Lorie’s flower shop, spawned Rustic Gardens in Kent, Connecticut, where they make one-of-a-kind outdoor furniture, bridges, fences, benches, and other garden structures inspired by the gifts of the forests around them.

“We work with nature to create something beautiful,” says Troy. For more than 20 years, homeowners from the surrounding area — especially those who live on Candlewood Lake and other bodies of water in Connecticut’s northwest corner — have come to Rustic Gardens for artistic railings, pergolas, and furniture (indoors and out) to enhance their property. Every piece is custom; Troy will make site visits or work with architectural plans, then allow the wood to speak to him. If he doesn’t have the pieces he needs in his workshop, he’ll go out and find them, hunting for trees with just the right branches that will become part of a table, a bench, a handrail. For the large jobs, he’ll install them on site with help of their son, Ty, who’s learning the trade from his father.

Troy and Lorie Brown. Photo credit: Rustic Gardens

Most of the wood they use is red cedar. It not only lasts the longest, Troy says, but there’s a lot of it around the area, so he’s not depleting the resources. And lest you think he’s randomly chopping down trees, Troy sources his materials from properties he owns as well as those of friends. It’s all precious stuff, he says, a sentiment you would expect when you hear him reflect on the curvature of the branches and the whorls in a slab of wood.

The twisty branches come from eastern red cedar trees. They’re debarked and cleaned. The natural curves lend a graceful touch to a rustic piece but present a challenge (or opportunity) to fitting them in a space. “I’m not just slapping stuff together,” Troy says. “There’s a lot involved, like putting together a puzzle.” He’s perfected a system of connecting the branches in a way that hides the hardware holding it all together. He explained how he does it, but let’s keep it a trade secret.

Troy inspects his collection of cedar branches, which he fits together like a puzzle in a piece of furniture.

A small forest of sinuous, cleaned branches stand outside the shop door, waiting to be woven into one of Troy’s designs. A foundation of a bench is on hold until the right piece of wood arrives to become the seat. Rustic Gardens also makes indoor furniture:  Live-edge slabs are used as kitchen counters you won’t find in a kitchen design store; bed frames and bannisters have curves.

Nothing goes to waste — not when you’re inspired by irregularities provided by nature. Clients and friends will often offer their cast-off building material to Rustic Gardens or invite Troy to come collect discards from a demolition. Troy was asked to take down a dangerous old barn and found plenty of uses for the materials donated by its owners, pointing out the picture frames and the metal pieces employed to hold up Lorie’s workbench. If there’s a flaw in the wood, Troy and Ty make it an integral part of a piece. A slab that’s cracked is filled in with epoxy resin, the negative space in the table making you look twice or three times as your eye tries to figure out just what’s going on there.

A crack in a slab of wood is fused with epoxy resin.

Some of the ingenious ideas come from Lorie (her Pinterest trolling is a bane of Troy’s life, he says, smiling). She has her own design skills, being a floral designer for over 35 years. The Browns’ wedding arbor that they moved into her shop got so much interest from customers that Troy pretty much trained himself to make his singular structures, and it turned into a business. Lorie provides flowers for weddings and events and also offers landscape design and maintenance services. And if you’d like her to outfit your home with Christmas decorations, she can do that, too.

The shop’s scenic location across the road from the Housatonic River is as captivating as the inside. The building once was home to a motorcycle shop, evidenced the Hard Knock Garage logo on a side wall. Lorie’s flowerpots, ceramics from a local artist and completed works by Troy are for sale in a cheerful space warmed by the fireplace. As Connecticut natives, and their use of local flower growers and wood from nearby trees, the Browns are living — and sharing — a life of local beauty.