This Old House star brings tree-to-table approach
Emmy-award winning TV host, renovator, and builder Steve Thomas joins forces with COA Provost and woodworker Ken Hill for an experiential deep dive into furniture making.
In Wood, Stone, and Steel: Building to Learn, Students studied furniture construction from a human-ecological perspective, experiencing every stage first-hand and embodying a reverence for nature in the process.
“We wanted to create primary encounters with the elemental building materials—wood, stone, and steel—that would then lead to thought-trains about sustainability. Sort of like farm-to-table, but for building,” Thomas said.
Thomas, the host of PBS’s most-watched show, This Old House, from 1989 through 2003, takes a direct, no-nonsense approach that welcomes students in and cultivates holistic, interconnected thinking.
“If you think of human ecology as a triangle with nature at the top, human beings on one side, and the built environment on the other, you can visualize the interaction,” he said. “Humans take from nature to create the built environment, and the built environment has a huge impact on nature, obviously.”
The 13 students in the course were led through the harvesting, processing, and building stages of bench making. Working in small groups, they conceived of, designed, and produced a number of benches for campus, along with one they all collaborated on, to be placed at the Acadia National Park Gateway Center in nearby Trenton.
“The only limit is you have to make a bench. So, you have a lot of creative freedom to explore and experiment,” said Blake Berry ’25.
Students were involved with every aspect of the bench-making process, including being present for the harvesting of an eastern white pine on campus that was slated to be removed for a building project and several dead-standing maples and pines.
“We went through the entire process, we didn’t cut the trees down, but we watched them be cut down. Then we planed them, sanded them all down, cleaned them up, stained them, cut our own bases by cutting steel I-beams, and customized them,” Berry said. “It’s just been from straight up log to bench through and through.”
The students explained that they started working with the materials and tools almost immediately. “I really appreciated the opportunity to get thrown into the process. You learn as you go and ask questions when you don’t know how things work,” explained Ellie Gabrielson ’25.
“No matter how big and gnarly the tools are, everybody can use them,” Thomas said. “It’s not about brute force but finesse and presence of mind, being one with the tool and the work. Students will say ‘Wow, I can just cut right through one of these great big slabs with a gigantic saw?’ And I’ll say, ‘Yeah! You can.’ So, it’s a lot of fun.”
The benches have quickly become cherished pieces of the campus landscape. Each bench has the COA logo and a QR code attached, which can be scanned to get the story of the class, the materials and process of the bench, and information about the team that designed it.
“I’m spending my retirement moving from bench to bench. Beautiful work you all!” exclaimed Dru Colbert, professor emerita of arts and design, in a community email.
Steve Thomas hosted PBS’s This Old House from 1989 through 2003, during which time the show rose to the top of PBS’s list of most-watched ongoing series. He was honored with a 1997-1998 Daytime Emmy Award and received a total of nine nominations for Outstanding Service Show Host. This Old House received 16 Emmys in total. In 2022, Thomas received a Lifetime Achievement Emmy for his work on the show. After 14 years hosting This Old House, Thomas went on to highlight historical restorations on the History Channel’s Save Our History and green renovation across America on Renovation Nation on Discovery’s Planet Green.
Thomas has renovated his own homes for more than 40 years, starting with a run-down 1920’s craftsman cottage in Olympia, Washington, then a number of historic homes in Salem, MA, and two houses and a barn on an island off the coast of Maine. He recently did a renovation/restoration of Sea Cove Cottage, a 1905 Victorian in a classic Maine lobstering village. Thomas builds and renovates homes for clients in the mid-coast Maine area with Steve Thomas Builders. He is a popular speaker, video producer, and writer. He is also committed to public service, serving on the Board of Trustees of the LifeFlight of Maine Foundation. For five years he worked with Habitat for Humanity International on the ReStore and Home Builders Blitz initiatives.
The other path in Thomas’s life has been adventure, which he attributes to his late grandfather, an Episcopal missionary in the remote Alaskan Arctic village of Point Hope. After college, Thomas crewed on a sailboat racing out to Hawaii, brought the boat back to Seattle, then spent a year in the Mediterranean as first mate of a 103’ schooner and as a boatbuilder in Antibes, France. Then, he sailed a 40’ sloop from England to San Francisco via the Panama Canal, Galapagos, Marquesas, and Hawaii. In the early 1980’s, he journeyed to the remote Micronesian island of Satawal to learn the ancient skill of star path navigation under the late master navigator, Mau Piailug. His research resulted in the critically acclaimed book, The Last Navigator, and a one-hour documentary for PBS’s Adventure series.