Cast iron, glass and a lamp that had dropped out of production.

Schoolhouse is a lighting and home-goods company based in Portland, Oregon, and it was started there by Brian Faherty. The design site Core77 told its origin story in November 2011: Faherty came across a cache of forgotten cast-iron moulds for glass lamp shades in a warehouse, restored them and began making the lamps again in 2002. The lamps were hanging school lights, the kind of fixture Core77 described as most popular in the first half of the twentieth century, and they were the company’s original product. That is where the name comes from: for years the business traded as Schoolhouse Electric & Supply Co., and reports from 2021 onwards mostly use the shorter name Schoolhouse.

Later accounts date the founding to 2003. When Food52 announced that it would buy the company in December 2021, the trade site HomePage News reported that Schoolhouse had been founded in Portland in 2003 by Faherty, whom it described as a former residential real-estate executive. Core77 therefore dates the first lamps from the restored moulds to 2002, while the 2021 acquisition coverage gives 2003 as the year the company was founded.

From the school lamps the range widened. By 2011 Core77 was describing other lighting fixtures and a broader line of home furnishings and accessories, including a reproduction of a mid-century IBM wall clock made with a spun-steel case, a domed glass cover and the lettering of the 1947 original. Later trade reports list lighting, textiles, hardware, wallpaper, rugs and other homewares under the Schoolhouse name.

A Portland founder, a Pittsburgh building, then two new owners.

For most of its history Schoolhouse was an independent company run from Portland. In April 2019 the East Liberty Development organisation in Pittsburgh interviewed Faherty, then the founder and chief executive of what it called a Portland-based lighting and homewares manufacturer, about a project far from Oregon. Schoolhouse had renovated the Detective Building in Pittsburgh’s East Liberty neighbourhood, a 1970s New Formalist building that had once housed detectives of the city’s police Bureau of Investigations and had stood vacant for years. The renovated building opened with a Schoolhouse design store, Beauty Shoppe co-working space and a coffee shop called The Bureau.

Ownership changed in December 2021. On 14 December 2021 the cooking and home site Food52 announced an agreement to acquire Schoolhouse. Business of Home reported that day that Schoolhouse would keep operating from its Portland headquarters as an independent company, that its president Sara Fritsch would stay on, and that Fritsch said the business had been privately held with no investors. Retail Dive added on 21 December 2021 that Fritsch would lead the brand alongside Food52’s chief executive Amanda Hesser and its president Claire Chambers. HomePage News quoted Hesser describing Schoolhouse as committed to American manufacturing, and reported that the deal took Food52 into lighting, soft goods, wallpaper and hardware.

A second change followed in February 2026. On 20 February 2026 Hudson Valley Lighting Group announced on its own website that it had officially acquired Schoolhouse Electric, and the kitchen-and-bath trade title KBB reported the news on 25 February 2026. Hudson Valley Lighting Group says Schoolhouse’s lighting, textiles, hardware and home-goods divisions will continue to operate under its umbrella and that the brand will keep its creative direction. The group’s founder and chief executive, David Littman, is quoted welcoming Schoolhouse into the group, and Hudson Valley Lighting Group describes the brand as known for domestic manufacturing.

On where things are made, the statements on record come from the owners: Food52 in 2021 and Hudson Valley Lighting Group in 2026 both described Schoolhouse in terms of American or domestic manufacturing.

Design and documentation.

Decorative lighting brands in the United States sit at several different points in the trade. Some began as workshops making fixtures by hand; some are design houses that draw a collection and have it made by factories and artisans elsewhere; some are retailers whose name appears on lamps they commission from others. A single name can be sold through a trade-only showroom, a design-district store, a catalogue and a website at once.

A lighting brand’s identity is usually carried less by one lamp than by a catalogue, a set of finishes, a showroom and the designers whose names appear beside its own. The company behind the name may have changed hands, taken in investors or moved where its fixtures are made since it started. That makes the questions behind each name worth asking plainly: who started it, who owns it now, and where its fixtures are actually made.

Each guide separates what independent sources record from what the company says about itself — its founding story, its owners over time, where its lamps are made and how it presents itself to the trade — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

A school-room lamp, a plain name and an American-made pitch.

The Schoolhouse identity starts with its name. It points straight at the product that began the company, the hanging school light cast from old moulds, and it carries the plain, institutional associations of classrooms, corridors and public buildings. The earlier trading name, Schoolhouse Electric & Supply Co., read like the sign of a trade supplier, and that supply-house tone suited a business whose first lamps were revived industrial objects rather than new inventions.

The second strand is reproduction done carefully. The IBM wall clock that Core77 described in 2011, with its spun-steel case, domed glass and 1947 lettering, shows a company interested in getting period detail right, down to the case, the glass and the lettering. The renovation of a 1970s police building in Pittsburgh into a store and shared workspace in 2019 points the same way, towards giving neglected objects and buildings a second use.

The third strand is the claim of American manufacturing, which both of the brand’s later owners repeated when they bought it. In 2026 the brand sits inside Hudson Valley Lighting Group and its Portland origin remains part of how the group presents it.

For a design guide, Schoolhouse shows how a single revived object, a glass school lamp, can anchor a whole home range and survive two changes of owner without losing its name. Compare Rejuvenation, another Portland lighting company built on period fixtures, and Hudson Valley Lighting, its owner since 2026. For this guide we use chalkboard green, milk glass, brass and ink with a plain gothic sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Schoolhouse’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.