Makers

Turning Houses into Homes

A collaboration of furniture makers, artists, and students is helping to make Asheville’s BeLoved Village feel like home.

By Elizabeth Foy Larsen
December 7, 2022

Winter 2023

#Craft Communities

Free To Read

Photo by Myles Pettengill

Students from Ellie Richards's seat weaving class in front of the first BeLoved Village home.

On the east side of Asheville, North Carolina, an organization called BeLoved Asheville is building 12 affordable tiny homes for people experiencing housing insecurity. The 440-square-foot houses, built largely by volunteers and furnished by local artisans affiliated with the Furniture Society, will be clustered along a walkway and painted in bright colors.

Called BeLoved Village, the project is the brainchild of Amy Cantrell, a Presbyterian pastor who understands the impact of the housing crisis on low-income residents. Through a series of community conversations, Cantrell learned what people want in a home. “People told us that the kind of housing they get put into isn’t the kind of housing they want,” she says. “We began to think seriously about how we could connect not only with carpenters . . . and the building industry, but also with folks who understood energetically what makes a space feel like a home, where people can belong and feel their worth.”

That’s where furniture maker and sculptor Ellie Richards came in. It was the end of summer 2020 and Richards was settling into her position as a resident artist at the Penland School of Craft in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina. The excitement of organizing her new studio was tempered by the realities of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Richards is a member of the Furniture Society, a national organization that advances the art of furniture making. The society had recently launched an initiative called Craft for a Greater Good (CGG) as a way to give back to the cities that hosted their annual conferences.

The 2020 conference was scheduled to take place in Asheville. Craving a way to make a positive contribution during an isolating time, Richards and her close friend and fellow furniture maker Annie Evelyn applied for and received funding from the Furniture Society to develop CGG programming in conjunction with the upcoming conference.

Photo by Myles Pettengill

Ellie Richards, left, demonstrating Shaker tape seat weaving techniques to BeLoved co-director Amy Cantrell.

Like most in-person events during the pandemic, the conference was canceled. But there was opportunity in that loss. A founding Furniture Society member named Brent Skidmore, who is also the director of Craft Studies at the University of North Carolina-Asheville, told Evelyn and Richards about BeLoved Village.

BeLoved’s mission to create a sense of home for the housing insecure was a natural fit with CGG. “We wanted the new residents to feel like they were coming home to a place that isn’t furnished with benign, mass-produced objects that have no connection to the place itself,” Richards says.

Working with Skidmore’s university students, Richards and Evelyn created a built-in entertainment unit for BeLoved’s model home, which went up in the fall of 2020. That project led to classes in upholstery, where students could learn for free if they donated the chair they worked on to BeLoved. Richards also taught a workshop to rehab Appalachian wooden chairs and make new seats with Shaker tape. Each chair has a hidden message of hope and good fortune tucked inside the weaving. “No one is ever going to see the messages,” says Richards. “But it brought us together in that moment to remember why our hands were doing this work.”

This summer, BeLoved broke ground on the project’s other 11 homes. Tenants, who will be chosen through a public application process, are scheduled to move in in early 2023. CGG is partnering with organizations across the country, including the California College of the Arts in Oakland and Berea College in Kentucky, to provide beautifully crafted homewares, such as bottle openers, drinking glasses, cutting boards, and quilted pillows. Residents will be able to choose which items they want, according to their needs and tastes.

Until the homes are finished, the furnishings are collected in a warehouse.

“We want to be very intentional about what the home environment looks like when people move in,” says Cantrell. “Handmade items are really important because they say somebody took the time to make something. That is a very clear message of love and that you are important, that you matter.”

Elizabeth Foy Larsen is a writer and editor living in Minneapolis. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, Mother Jones, the Daily Beast, Travel + Leisure, and the Star Tribune.

Photo by Ellie Richards

These small plant stands were donated by furniture designer Chelsea Witt’s students at Moorestown Friends School.

Photo by Ellie Richards

A UNC Asheville student makes a woven kolam doormat; the kolam is a mandala shape that adorns doorways throughout Asia.
Photo by Ellie Richards

Wood kitchen utensils donated to BeLoved Village by PennWest Edinboro student Ken Bownes.

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