Our Story

Made by Hand.
Built to Last.

The Workshop

CradleRock started in a small barn in central Vermont in 2014. Our founder, Martin Gagne, spent fifteen years as a furniture maker before deciding to focus on one thing and do it as well as possible: the rocking chair.

Not the decorative kind. Not the flat-pack kind. The kind you sit in every evening, that creaks slightly to the left because it's been your spot for twelve years, that your kids will argue over at the estate sale.

Every chair that leaves our shop is made by one person, start to finish. Not an assembly line. One person. That means the person who cuts your tenons is the same person who sands your rockers, oils your seat, and packs your shipment.

CradleRock workshop

How We Work

Solid Wood Only

No MDF, no plywood, no engineered wood. Every piece is solid hardwood — oak, walnut, cherry, maple, or white oak depending on the chair. We cut our own lumber from boards, so we see the grain before it becomes a chair.

Traditional Joinery

Mortise-and-tenon joints, dovetails on the seat rails, hand-cut tapers on the rockers. No pocket screws, no wood glue in structural joints. The joinery holds the chair together — wood glue is a finish product, not a structural material.

Hand-Finished

Sanded through five grits by hand. First coat, sand again. Second coat, sand again. Hand-rubbed oil finish or painted with low-VOC milk paint. We don't rush the finish — it's what you'll touch every time you sit down.

Local Sourcing

All our lumber comes from sawmills within 300 miles of our shop in northern Vermont. We know the mills, we know the lumber, and we know the trees came from sustainably managed forests.

Handcrafted detail work

One Chair at a Time

We make between 80 and 120 chairs per year. That's it. We don't take on more than we can finish well. If our lead time is six weeks, it's because we're building chairs in order, not because we're rushing.

Before your chair ships, we'll send you photos of the finished piece. You can approve it or ask for adjustments before it goes in the box. That's the deal.