Richard Wrightman's furniture has the air of having traveled somewhere before arriving. That is, in fact, the point: his collection of campaign-style pieces — now numbering more than a hundred designs — owes as much to Danish Modern as it does to the British colonial vocabulary, and a great deal to a single chair that belonged to his father when Wrightman was a boy.

The chair was a late-19th-century campaign chair that broke down for travel, very much like the Chatwin chairs Wrightman makes today. The family took it with them as they set up camp between continents, and he disassembled and rebuilt it again and again. "I appreciated the functionality of the design," he says, "and I always felt that the chair had its own secret history of places it had been. Campaign furniture is both romantic and timeless."

The route from that chair to his own studio ran through fashion, then fabrication. In 1996 he joined Product & Design, one of New York City's leading architectural fabrication shops, where he built prototypes and production pieces for prominent architects and designers — Ali Tayar, Marc Newson, James Carpenter, Thomas O'Brien, Steven Harris, and Deborah Berke — an apprenticeship, in effect, in how ambitious ideas actually get built. Four years later he set out on his own, and has been at it for a quarter-century.

In 2021 he moved Richard Wrightman Design from New York City to Litchfield County, Connecticut. The studio now sits on the Farmington River in New Hartford, in an 1840s mill building, where some of his original New York team and several new hands continue the work. He lives in an 1816 farmhouse in Norfolk with his partner Simone, a singer-songwriter and light sculptor, and their chocolate standard poodle, George.