About

Stephanie Odegard Co. Ltd. makes handmade furniture, lighting, rugs and objects with master artisans across India and Nepal. Metal is clad by hand over carved wood and cast by the lost-wax method. Marble is carved into jali screens and inlaid with stone and shell in the pietra dura tradition. Every piece is made to order.

The company was founded in 1987 by Stephanie Odegard, who had spent the previous decade building craft industries in Fiji, Jamaica and Nepal for the Peace Corps, the United Nations and the World Bank. That work shaped how the company still operates: the artisans are partners, and what we sell is their skill.

Custom work is the centre of the business. Whether you arrive with a sketch, a technical drawing, or an idea you have not drawn yet, our design team develops it with you and renders it in CAD for approval before anything is made. 

Stephanie Odegard

Stephanie Odegard has spent fifty years working with artisans in developing countries, building the industries around their skills rather than simply buying their work. She has established craft centres, trained workshops, restored a Georgian mansion into a national design institution, and helped create a carpet industry from nothing.

She graduated from the University of Minnesota in 1969 and worked as a buyer for Dayton Hudson before opening her own yarn shop in Grand Marais, Minnesota. In 1976 she joined the Peace Corps, with assignments in Fiji, Jamaica and Nepal.

In Fiji, she developed traditional crafts for export alongside Fijian counterparts, including stencilled bark cloth from the outer islands, wood carving, woven mats and traditional bowl ware. She established the Fiji Handicraft Center, built with local materials in vernacular style and still operating today. The United Nations retained her afterwards to continue this work across other Pacific economies.

In 1981, Stephanie was recruited by the Jamaican government and UNIDO to lead a national craft revival in Kingston. Based at Devon House, the Georgian mansion restored with Italian designer Sergio Dello Strologo, she developed Things Jamaican into an integrated design institution. Its workshops produced embroidered textiles, hand-carved furniture, hand-thrown ceramics, cast pewter including reproduction spoons from the Port Royal period, and craft packaging for Blue Mountain coffee and preserves.

Main production ran from a factory in central Kingston employing a substantial local workforce, supplemented by village workshops and craft experts she brought in from around the world to lead specific categories. She developed the retail network that still rings Devon House and anchors Jamaica's international airports, along with the restaurant and ice cream shop that remain the site's principal draws. She stayed for three and a half years.

In Nepal, Stephanie worked with Tibetan weavers to develop a carpet industry. In 1987 she founded her own company. A Macy's San Francisco promotion the following year, built around a Tibetan tent, gave the work its first national audience. David Druckman of the New York Design Center followed with her first showroom.

Stephanie was a founding member of GoodWeave alongside Kailash Satyarthi, and hers was the first company to offer certified child-labour-free carpets. She serves as an advisor and board member to GoodWeave, the Kathmandu Valley Preservation Trust and the KTK-Belt Project.

Her awards include the Peace Corps Award for International Economic Development, 2001; Aid to Artisans Award, 2004; Twin Cities International Citizen Award, 2008; ASID Individual Product Prize, 2009; New York Cottages and Gardens Innovator Award, 2012; University of Minnesota Alumni Notable Achievement Award, 2013; and Iqbal Masih Award for the Elimination of Child Labor, 2018.

The Collection

Stephanie has devoted her career to artisans who hold rare craft traditions and to the prosperity that keeps those traditions alive. She began with carpets and expanded into finely crafted objects, with particular focus on techniques that flourished during the Mughal period.

Fifteen years of consulting in craft sectors across many countries prepared her to develop not only textiles but furniture, accessories and architectural fixtures. Much of the work begins with a new concept developed with a designer, using established craft skills to realise a specific vision for an interior.

The collection commissions contemporary pieces from artisans in India and Nepal across furniture, lighting, decorative accessories and architectural elements. Surfaces and forms retain clear evidence of the hand that made them, whether the work is highly decorative or minimally modern. Materials include wood, stone, copper and other precious materials.

The Materials

The most demanding work comes from architects and designers who arrive with something that does not yet exist.

For architect Peter Marino, the workshops have produced a monumental metal-clad headboard with a hand-raised openwork botanical crest, a Quran box, a hand-engraved metal-clad coffee table, and a reproduction of an antique beaded glass lamp developed from a single photograph in an old magazine. Recreating the lamp required rediscovering the technique from first principles.

For the same client, the atelier recreated a room from an Indian palace with ceiling, walls and floor covered in reverse-painted mirror glass and spherical thikri mosaic, in the manner of the Kanch Ki Burj.

In New York, the atelier produced two reception desks for the Charney buildings on Broadway. The desk at 1441 is built from three marble panels inlaid with a continuous brass filigree, a circling pattern cut from a single sheet of brass with no joints, fitted over an existing desk within a total tolerance of six millimetres. At 1410, an elliptical reception desk of twenty-two feet in circumference carries more than three hundred brass spheres suspended from a metal structure.

The metal-clad furniture line began with a Miami project developed with Alison Spear: square, clean-lined pieces clad in white bronze and riveted with small nails. It developed into the Louise Collection with Paul Mathieu, comprising hand-carved wooden forms clad in white bronze, golden bronze and silver.

Rug collaborations with Jack Lenor Larsen produced two collections. One drew from designs held by the Anni Albers Foundation, while Architectural Footprints was based on architectural plan drawings. The Navaratna carpet collection took its cue from Mughal jewellery in Stephanie's own collection.

Hospitality and institutional work includes carpets and furniture for the Greenwich Hotel in Tribeca and bauble-centric totems for the Stir lobby bar at the Disney Swan Reserve in Florida. Carpets have entered the collections of the J. Paul Getty Museum and the Phillips Collection. Current work includes furniture and rugs for a historic lakeside villa in Switzerland.

Earlier commissions include a chair from the Raj period, cotton khadi panels, and silk and cashmere textiles.

How we work

What the company makes

The collection spans five categories: casegoods, tables, seating, lighting and accessories, alongside hand-knotted rugs.

Metal-clad furniture is built on hardwood frames and clad by hand in sheet metal. Four metals are offered: brass, copper, white bronze and antiqued white bronze. Each is available in three surface textures, smooth, fine hammered and medium hammered, giving twelve hand-applied finishes in total. Metal is also cast using the lost-wax method and fabricated by hand.

Stone work includes marble and semi-precious stone carved into jali screens and architectural forms, as well as pietra dura inlay, in which stone and shell are cut and set into marble surfaces. Materials include white, black, grey and green marble, Jaisalmer stone, rainbow teakwood stone, agate, katni and mother of pearl.

Rugs are hand-knotted in Nepal and India.

How orders work

Every piece is made to order and built for the client who commissions it.

Orders begin with a conversation and proceed through inquiry and quotation, physical finish samples and a technical drawing, followed by approval, deposit, production, inspection, packing and shipment.

For customised pieces, the in-house design team produces a technical drawing rendered in 3D for client approval before production begins. Custom dimensions, finishes, materials and fully bespoke designs are available, including work developed from a client's own sketch, drawing or concept.

Standard production lead time is 8 to 12 weeks, beginning after deposit and drawing approval. Shipping is quoted separately and is typically FOB India. Standard payment terms are 50% deposit before production and 50% before shipment. Pieces ship worldwide.

Who the company works with

Clients include interior designers, architects, private collectors, hospitality projects and property developers. Trade pricing is available.

In the press

The collection has been featured in the New York Times, House Beautiful, Interior Design, COVER Magazine and OBJET. The work was included in the Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum exhibition "Why Design Now?" in 2010. Stephanie's oral history is held in the Jack Lenor Larsen Oral History Project at the University of Minnesota's Goldstein Museum of Design, recorded in September 2016.

Where the work appears

Pieces are listed on 1stDibs and shown on this website.

Founded 1987 · Headquarters 135 east 55th Street New York, NY 10022, United States · Production India and Nepal · Founder Stephanie Odegard · Production model made to order · Lead time 8 to 12 weeks · Shipping worldwide.