Celebrate Craft + Integrity At Kate Swanson’s Vermont Gallery

Vermont has been quietly home to aesthetics-related endeavors for awhile. Hubbardton Forge and its metal- and woodworkers established there in 1974; Simon Pearce and its glassblowers set up shop in Quechee in 1981. But similar to the New York City to Hudson Valley exodus during COVID, more designers and artists are heeding the call of the Green Mountain State’s bucolic serenity and collaborative spirit. Our pal François Chambard of UM Project recently moved his object-design workshop from Brooklyn to near Middlebury. And Kate Swanson has just launched Nurture by Nature, a tidy Burlington gallery named after her 5-year-old residential-interiors studio.

“Craft, rarity, and integrity are what make an item truly special. The gallery celebrates that,” says Swanson, a fourth-generation Vermonter who’s returned after a dozen years in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, cutting her teeth at architecture and design firms there. The dozens of furniture, lighting, and decorative pieces in “Unknown Friends,” the debut exhibit, showcase that integrity she mentions, each one hand-produced by makers based outside Vermont—Ford Bostwick and Natalie Shook among them—with the hope of “sparking exchange between locals and the broader design community,” Swanson adds, “of weaving new voices into the existing creative fabric.”