Erin Murphy is the owner and Reservoir designer of Reservoir, a curated lifestyle boutique located in the Hudson River town of Beacon, NY. A native Michigander with not only a love for runway shows and high fashion, but a soft spot for fly-fishing, hiking with her dogs, and gardening, Murphy fell in love with the former mill town turned art destination when her husband took a job as an aquatic ecologist near the Ashokan Reservoir in Ulster County. Just an 80-minute train ride from Grand Central Terminal, Beacon became their “meet in the middle” spot as she continued her full-time freelance work with high-concept womenswear and accessories brand, Proenza Schouler. As she ping-ponged between cityscape and countryside, the inspiration to create “high-end style with unrestricted trailblazing versatility” was born.
Now a permanent Beacon resident, Murphy’s Reservoir draws inspiration from both these past experiences in NYC and her current life upstate, creating a line that features stretch charmeuse blouses and gold accented floral print shorts. “What inspires me is just something that I want to wear, something comfortable for me and my lifestyle,” Murphy says. “There’s a lot of girls like me who like to have backyard picnics or little getaways in the mountains, but that doesn’t mean we want to wear a sweatshirt.”

“As long as I lived in the city, I never really felt like a city guy,” recalls Joshua Vogel, a woodworker, sculptor, and part-owner of Blackcreek Mercantile, a studio and shop he runs with his partner, Kelly, in Kingston, N.Y. “There’s this idea that you’re living in one of the largest metropolises in the world and you should be exposed to all this artwork. But I was living there and working so hard, I went to the Met [Metropolitan Museum of Art] maybe twice. It took leaving the city to get back to the museum.”
Inspiration now comes from Joshua’s natural surroundings, having traded the geometric angles of cement pillars for the poetic grains of tree branches he finds on long walks near his home. Bearing a physical and emotional connection to the material he uses, he gathers these fallen branch pieces, shaping them into free-form sculptures or turnings. Sustainably harvested maple and cherry wood takes the form of tantalizing kitchen tools and cutting boards. These small scale products — hand carved and made-to-order — are then sold in the shop or to specialty stores all over the world.

Be it sculpture or spatula, Joshua insists there is a similar intention to everything he creates. “On one end of the spectrum, the sculpture can be very open-ended. On the other, it can be more literal, like a spoon,” he says. “There’s certainly a niché we’ve found with woodworking and kitchenware. The point of the spoons [and other kitchen tools] is to connect people with the fact that handmade things can add to your life in a positive way.”