Inside the Tight-Knit Network of Heywood-Wakefield Obsessives

Spend enough time shopping used midcentury-modern furniture on Facebook Marketplace or Craigslist and soon enough you’ll encounter pieces from Heywood-Wakefield. The circa-1890s American furniture company, which had its heyday in the 1930s through ’50s, isn’t the most well-known name from the midcentury era, but for its active base of dedicated collectors, it can have a near addictive quality.

On Facebook, several dedicated groups including "Heywood Wakefield Fanatic Collectors," "Heywood Wakefield BST," and "Heywood Wakefield Furniture"—with 2,60o; 1,800; and 11,500 members, respectively, at the time of writing—provide online spaces for thousands of superfans to congregate and discuss the furniture: how to find it, how to refinish it, and how to live with it. Though some members have purely transactional relationships to the online forums—joining only to find someone to buy a piece they’re offloading—many engage daily with the groups, sharing intel about the identity of a specific furnishing, tips on how to refinish, or photos of their own Heywood-Wakefield–filled living spaces. "There’s about a third of us who are out there and encourage each other and enjoy looking at the transformation process," says Joe Girard, a member of the Heywood-Wakefield Facebook groups who’s earned the "Group Expert" and "All Star Contributor" badges; the first a designation from group admins marking a trusted source of information for other users, the other awarded by the platform to highly active participants.

Though Heywood-Wakefield produced furniture in a myriad of styles before it went bankrupt in the late ’70s, the company’s name is most associated with the solid wood pieces from its mid-2oth-century prime. Designer Gilbert Rohde, who would later help modernize Herman Miller, marked a turning point for Heywood-Wakefield with the Rohde Contemporary Furniture line in 1931. The collection had curvaceous Art Deco-inspired details and modular options that strayed from the traditional and colonial-style pieces the company produced prior (which hold little value on the resale market and haven’t inspired a fraction of the fandom). Though Rhode’s first Heywood-Wakefield collection was crucial for reshaping the company’s identity, the Streamline Modern and Modern lines, unassociated with Rohde, are what most collectors obsess over today. The pieces from that era are also what gave the company its foothold in the 21st century’s MCM zeitgeist, perhaps most notably for very online furniture fans in inspiring the "Herman Wakefield" pseudonym (a portmanteau of Herman Miller and Heywood-Wakefield) of the person behind the wildly popular design meme account formerly known as @northwest_mcm_wholesale.

In Facebook groups, this obsession manifests through people sharing photos of their own spaces, displaying the wide range in taste of people who appreciate Heywood-Wakefield. (Though you might expect most users to be midcentury-modern fanatics, there are just as many homes with otherwise contemporary furniture.) Users share photos of pieces found for a steal at Goodwill or alert other members to deals on their local Craigslist or Facebook Marketplace listings. When someone asks for tips on identifying a specific piece, people answer using Heywood-Wakefield Modern Furniture, a 1994 "identification and value guide" for pieces produced by the company between the mid-’30s and ’60s, written, as the authors state in the intro, to address the lack of "reliable information" for Heywood-Wakefield collectors and dealers. Today, the online groups are a way of combatting that same lack of documentation from the company’s heyday, relative to other larger furniture manufacturers.

Much like its place in today’s resale market, in its heyday, Heywood-Wakefield wasn’t a furniture company for elites, nor was it the least expensive option. The pieces were an investment that the common person could make knowing that the items would have a long lifespan. "A lot of people would buy, let’s say, a whole dining room set, and you get a little bit of a price break from that, but they actually made payments on it like you would when you bought a car," says Girard. "You might pay for it over the course of two or three years, but you never bought another set of iron furniture ever."

The quality of Heywood-Wakefield furniture—constructed from solid wood (Northern Yellow birch), and made largely in factories in the Unites States—is part of what makes it a good buy on the resale market. The pieces also tend to be easier to refinish than other frequently found furnishings made from wood veneer from the same period.

Girard has spent 16 years on and off refinishing tables, chairs, and other furniture pieces by the brand. After retiring from his career as a teacher, it’s now his main squeeze and he advertises his refinished pieces solely on Facebook. "I probably have enough to refinish till the day I die, which is a lot," he says. "If I did it, 24/7, 365, I’m not even sure I could still finish everything I had." Girard has refinished Heywood-Wakefield pieces that seemed to be destined for the scrap pile, including a recent coffee table that had been burnt with a blowtorch for a burnt wood effect by its previous owner. His Facebook group post received 53 comments and 170 reactions, with multiple commenters thanking Girard for bringing the piece back to life. Others asked for tips on how he approached certain refinishing issues so that they can apply his approach to their own projects.

One member of "Heywood Wakefield Furniture," Ryan Maly, took the community’s spirit of resource-sharing a step further by developing custom stains that mimic the Wheat and Champagne stains that are beloved by collectors but hard to replicate. During his development process, Maly offered the stains to Facebook group members to test; now, other users regularly recommended it when newbies join asking for stain advice. "At this point I don’t find a need to run Facebook ads or SEO campaigns or things like that," says Maly. "People talk and recommend it to each other. It’s a very tight-knit community."

Though Heyw0od-Wakefield furniture stopped being manufactured after the company went bankrupt, some fan-favorite lines have been back in production since the early ’90s, when two preservationists and a furniture executive bought the rights to the company’s copyright and began reviving its name. Still in operation as Heywood-Wakefield, the company produces new pieces reverse-engineered from original designs—with small modifications that make them more durable—as well as modern pieces, like queen- and king- size beds that weren’t previously in production. The pieces are still created entirely in the United States with solid wood, giving customers reason to believe they’ll have a similarly long life to their 20th-century counterparts.

As much as Heywood-Wakefield furniture appeals to its enthusiasts aesthetically, because of its longevity, plenty of people also have deep familial connections to the pieces. Chris Parody of Strictly Hey-Wake, a Maryland store that sells and refinishes solely Heywood-Wakefield pieces, has witnessed this on multiple buying trips. He’s been called in after the death of a loved one, leading to some unusual encounters across the country. "A lot of times [when I was picking up furniture in person], I would hear from the kids or relatives of the older people who had passed on...they would say how the mother was so proud of her furniture, and she never let us use it," says Parody. "That was kind of nice."

The Strictly Hey-Wake owner has a lot of repeat customers, including one who’s been buying from him for 20 years, and says he’s had numerous customers who’ve died but made it known that they wanted their Heywood-Wakefield pieces to his shop after their death. "It’s a weird feeling," he says. "You can’t be happy about getting the furniture."

It seems the network of Heywood-Wakefield enthusiasts who connect to one another on and offline springs in part from a desire to keep the furniture in the family of appreciators. "I would say ninety-nine percent of the people that I buy from have a story and are super happy that the furniture is going to go, ultimately, to somebody who will continue its legacy," says Girard. "People want to sell this type of furniture to other people that they know are going to really enjoy it and take care of it," Maly adds. "Not somebody who’s going to put chalk paint on it."

Top photo courtesy Heywood-Wakefield.

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