While many chase speed and volume, Fort Myers designer Dwayne Bergmann knows the most compelling work comes from slowing the pace and elevating the process. When the market can’t keep up with his vision, he expands the field rather than compromise—an approach that has led to a couture cabinetry line, a series of marble pieces done with Italian brand Kreoo and a home goods collection over the past six years.
In his inaugural furniture line, launched last spring, Bergmann employs the same rigor for exacting proportions, honest materials and a respect for craft. He found his equal in Abner Henry, an Amish workshop led by a multigenerational maker, Ernest Hershberger.
The Fort Myers designer had already partnered with the Ohio workshop for client projects, sourcing their custom furnishings, which can be tailored with specific dimensions, distinct woods and hundreds of finishes and hardware options. Bergmann appreciated the workshop’s ability to execute curved solid hardwood, hand-applied finishes and joinery precision at scale. Abner Henry, for their part, had collaborated with The Metropolitan Museum of Art and New York designer Sasha Bikoff. But their roster lacked a designer focused on livable sophistication to create furnishings with enough architectural authority to register as design objects but restrained enough to serve varied aesthetics.
Bergmann’s line—which spans nearly 100 pieces across 14 collections, with a new one debuting in April—channels his distinct sensibility: European tradition scaled to contemporary American proportions, Art Deco flair with functional clarity. He aims to bring the craft discipline and detailing of bygone eras into modern-day homes. “A lot of Art Deco and midcentury modern furnishings are what we would consider apartment style or apartment sizing,” he says. Coffee tables measured 13 or 14 inches tall; dining tables rarely exceeded 6 feet. He’s taken the classic design-forward forms and scaled them to contemporary standards. Everything is hand-finished and made from solid wood, drawing from 10 species, most sourced from America.
Many manufacturers would have declined when presented with Bergmann’s first sketch: the Glasgow nightstand, with its solid wood top curved into an arc and finished with a reverse bevel. But Abner Henry just got to work, recreating the arching detail in nine pieces, including a desk, ottoman and a cocktail table. For The Roma Collection, the designer envisioned a door with slightly bowing fronts that sharpen into a knife-edge—an unusually refined profile that demanded custom molds. Once the tooling existed, they extended the motif across beds, chests and consoles.
Such detailing is unusual in today’s furniture market, where consumers often choose between aesthetics and quality or face prohibitive costs and months-long production times. By merging traditional Amish woodworking methods with digital precision, Abner Henry delivers furniture built for generations, shipped straight from the Ohio workshop within weeks.
The workshop operates in Holmes County, Ohio, where Hershberger, a furniture maker since the eighth grade, and four of his sons oversee a hybrid process: CNC machines handle initial cuts with digital accuracy, then craftspeople take over for hand-sanding, edge detailing and finishing processes that layer color and protective topcoats through up to a dozen applications. A regional network of specialized glassblowers, metalworkers and wood artisans lends their expertise for details, like the Dublin dining table’s hand-cast bronze base, which appears molten with its sculpted relief.
On Bergmann’s side, everything begins with a freehand sketch. “I’ll be sifting through photos and reflecting on a trip and see something—a railing that I photographed while in a train station, a detail in a ceiling—that triggers an idea,” he explains. Then, his in-house visualization team translates the drawings into 3D and AutoCAD files, working through scale and joinery before anything leaves Fort Myers. Finally, resolved concepts arrive in Ohio, ready for engineering.
Drawing from his interior design experience, he conceives pieces that have presence but don’t overpower a room. “Most people don’t want a museum in their living room,” he says with a laugh. The palette remains restrained—charcoal, navy, natural walnut, occasional brass or blackened steel. As with other Abner Henry creations, each design is customizable through the workshop’s proprietary VuePoint platform, where designers can adjust and track projects in real time.
Still, the furnishings command attention through their use of mixed materials, geometric detailing and the intentionally wielded dramatic gesture or two. Personal references surface throughout: The Cambridge and Oxford nesting coffee tables nod to Bergmann’s sons (“They are also twins and they go together,” he says). But mostly, the designs nod to the places that feed his sketchbooks. The Glasgow’s curved form, for instance, takes its shape from a Roman tunnel, where half of the structure had been blown out for construction. “It’s an abstract process of taking that form and applying it to my world of furnishings,” the designer says. Elsewhere in the line, furnishings carry cultural nods, filtered through Bergmann’s design language: the Porto dresser’s scalloped facade, the Crete bench’s monolithic form, the Bilbao’s sculptural fluidity.
While developing the line, Bergmann was also building his Fort Myers home. In the primary suite, an extra-large Roma bed (customized with an oval shape) sits between a pair of Glasgow nightstands; the Dublin dining table, Crete pieces and the Oxford and Cambridge tables anchor the main living. “I wanted every case good in my home to be something I designed,” he says.
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