“Building a New Way of Learning” is a four-part series on Sam Beauford Woodworking Institute, a premier accredited trade school in Adrian, Michigan, where traditional techniques meet contemporary practice. Through the perspectives of the founder, a student, an instructor, and a weekend learner, this series explores the ways a school can radically transform the community around it.
The building had sat empty for years before woodworkers filled it with sawdust, and the sounds of their hammers and chisels. Originally a girls’ reformatory, built in 1880 on the edge of Adrian, Michigan, the space was offered to Chairmaker Luke Barnett by the city for a dollar a year.
Luke Barnett & Samson Beauford Barnett
Barnett had been making sculpted Windsor chairs long enough to carry a two-year waitlist, and was teaching one student at a time out of his living room when the Adrian space provided an opportunity for something bigger.
In 2015, the Sam Beauford Woodworking Institute opened its doors. Wires hung from the ceiling. The nearest bathroom was at a McDonald’s down the street. Despite all that, students arrived from all over the country, and they have not stopped coming since.
Named, with characteristic irreverence, for one of Barnett’s dogs, what began as a scrappy woodworking school has since grown into something much more ambitious: a model for what trade education could become.
In 2020, SBWI launched its first yearlong program in response to growing demand for woodworkers and concerns about the decline of skilled trades in Michigan. Seven students graduated in 2021; the following year, there were 14. Today, the school accepts 24 students each year—and receives more than 300 applications for those spots.
“If all these people want to learn how to make a living doing what they love,” Barnett says, “we should not be turning them away.”
To meet that demand, SBWI is now building a new campus, following a $16 million fundraising effort. The timber-frame campus is designed around a question Barnett has been asking for years: Why shouldn’t the people who make the things we live with, and live in, have educational spaces as ambitious as those built for doctors and lawyers? Barnett wonders, “Why aren’t carpenters and furniture makers and woodworkers honored in the same way?”
The facility will enable SBWI to expand far beyond its existing furniture program. New programs launching in 2027 include Timber Framing and Architectural Carpentry & Preservation, opening new pathways into the trades and bringing students with different skills, interests, and ambitions together under one roof.
Architect rendering of the new campus currently under construction
But the new campus represents more than an increase in square footage and enrollment. Barnett and his team see it as an opportunity to rethink what a trade school can be, and what it can offer the people who pass through it. SBWI teaches fundamentals and design principles, while also encouraging students to explore their own creative approaches. “We really take pride in helping students develop their own language and their own design style,” Barnett says.
That emphasis on collaborative creativity reflects a larger philosophy at SBWI: Knowledge is meant to be shared, not guarded; craft is both a livelihood and a creative practice; and the trades deserve to be treated not as an alternative to education, but as a vital form of it.
The first students to enter the Frank Lloyd Wright-inspired campus in 2027 will have a role in determining what all of that looks like in practice. They will be among the first to work in these shops, learn these programs, and quite literally leave their mark on a building dedicated to shaping the future of the trades.
Chase Swatzell, Class of '25
Luke Barnett & Daniel Kraus, Class of '25
Rahme Mourad, Class of '24
The Sam Beauford Woodworking Institute offers accredited programs in Furniture Design, Timber Framing, and Architectural Carpentry & Preservation as well as weekend and week-long classes that are open to anyone. You can learn more on Instagram, Facebook, YouTube or online at sbwi.edu.
As seen in Craftsmanship Magazine