M. Crow & Company, a new boutique at 16 Howard Street in SoHo, is filled with lust-worthy, whimsical wares you probably never knew you needed.
A marshmallow roasting stick made of oil-rubbed walnut, copper and leather ($60). A child’s leather tool belt with a toy hammer made of cherry and Osage wood ($250). A pickle jar handcrafted from local clay and glazed with wood-stove ashes ($260). A pot of hair product made with homemade beeswax and hand-expelled oils ($120).
The store’s interior was just as laborious to build. By the entrance, the floor is a mosaic of hand-painted white-and-blue ceramic disks; deeper inside, the floor is maple marquetry recalling the layered feathers of a bird.
Taken together, the shop evokes the edited yet wide-ranging output of an obsessive, eccentric master craftsman who’s dedicated to hyperlocal production. And that’s precisely what it is.
M. Crow is the latest endeavor of Tyler Hays, who is better known as the owner and designer of the upscale furniture company BDDW, known for exquisitely handcrafted pieces that cost upward of $100,000. The 1,500-square-foot store may be just months old, but it is actually the second location. The first opened 108 years ago.
The original M. Crow is a general store in the tiny town of Lostine (estimated population: 209) in northeastern Oregon; it is down the road from Mr. Hays’s hometown, Joseph, Ore., at the base of the Wallowa Mountains. When the store was set to close in 2012, Mr. Hays bought it and remade it in his own vision.
“It’s the oldest operating store in Wallowa County,” said Mr. Hays, 47, a hearty man with the scruff and broad fingers of a woodsman and the warmth and storytelling ability of a cool uncle. “I couldn’t watch it fall apart knowing that my great-great-grandparents were watching, when I could do something about it.”
Today, M. Crow in Lostine still serves as a general store, albeit one that also sells local produce and beef, hardware, beer brewed in the back room and ceramics made with clay dug a few miles down the road. It also carries discounted items from Mr. Hays’s line of meticulously produced accessories.
But the larger vision for the brand is to extend the loving craftsmanship that BDDW is known for to products that address every aspect of daily life. Indeed, Mr. Hays said it stems from a childhood dream to personally make every object in his life from scratch.
“I’m a junkie for making everything myself,” he said. “I’m not interested unless I can control the entire process. I learned to use a sewing machine that my grandma gave me when I was 5. When I was 9, I welded a go-kart. My brother and I rebuilt engines, and made cannons and guns.” He also built primitive furniture in his parents’ yard with a circular saw.
“He’s got a fearless approach to all materials, from food to furniture to clothing,” said Tom Sachs, an artist who is a longtime friend of Mr. Hays. “Tyler is an artist who happens to specialize in furniture. He takes that artist approach to whatever he does.”
Since founding BDDW in the late 1990s, Mr. Hays has been thrilling design purists with gorgeously handcrafted, minimalist furniture like dining tables with weighty live-edge claro walnut slab tops and cast bronze legs, and credenzas constructed from contrasting hardwoods perched atop blackened steel bases.
He opened his first showroom at the entrance to Freeman Alley on the Lower East Side in 1998, long before every Brooklyn furniture designer with a table saw claimed to do the same. “I said I was going to put the cool back in craft,” Mr. Hays said at the time.
BDDW relocated to its current 6,000-square-foot showroom on Crosby Street in SoHo in 2001, and developed a cult following.
With business booming, Mr. Hays now runs a 150,000-square-foot production facility in Philadelphia with about 100 employees. But rather than focusing on maximizing his company’s bottom line, he views the operation as infrastructure for exploring his every creative whim.
In addition to furniture, his workshop now produces ceramics (using clay dug in Philadelphia and Lostine), clothing (sewn from fabric he machine-weaves and hand-dyes, with buttons he carves by hand), knives (crafted from repurposed band-saw blades), leather boxes (lined with sheepskin), stereo speakers (constructed from select woods) and pretty much anything else Mr. Hays can dream up, including bows and arrows for his archery club.
And yet, he’s just getting started. For now, most M. Crow products are made in Philadelphia, even though many of them use raw materials from Oregon. Mr. Hays said he plans to build a workshop in Lostine that will take over much of M. Crow’s production while creating jobs for area residents.
But he will begin by building what just may be Oregon’s most extravagant microbrewery.
“A guy I grew up with is a barley farmer, and his grandpa invented a strain of barley that’s gone out of favor,” Mr. Hays said. “We’re planting 15 acres this spring, and I’m developing this brewery in the field.”
The M. Crow brewery will produce not only its own beer, but also its own sculptural ceramic bottles from local clay. “I’m building a wood-fired kiln, and the waste heat of the kiln will power the brewery,” he said.
Like many BDDW and M. Crow products, all that labor and care will probably result in hefty price tags. M. Crow already sells ceramic growlers containing its beer and cider for $600 a jug. “It’s like an art object,” Mr. Hays added, and probably not the kind of thing you would crack open to relax after a long day.
The beer and the vessels are just parts of his larger vision for a complete lifestyle of his own making. “Most of the products are things I want for myself,” he said. “It’s all based on the idea of making everything I touch.”
