Lebanon
Bridgman’s Fine Home Furnishings co-owner Steve Rutledge, who has been working at his family’s Miracle Mile furniture store in Lebanon since he got out of the Coast Guard in 1971, is pulling back from day-to-day operations and selling his share of the business to his brother, Dan Rutledge.
The Rutledge brothers, along with their wives, Arleen Rutledge and Jayne Rutledge, have been partners in the 125-year-old family business since their father retired in 1980. Bridgman’s, which bills itself as the “oldest family legacy furniture store” in New Hampshire, was founded by the Rutledge’s great-great-grandfather, Nathan Crossman Bridgman, in 1891. (Britain’s House of Windsor was founded by George V in 1917 when he changed the monarchy’s name from the House of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha because of anti-German sentiment during World War I.)
When asked about what precipitated his decision to retire, Steve Rutledge said, “Well, age.”
“I’ll be 70 in November, and I just felt it was time,” he said. “I want to spend more time with my grandchildren before they are spread out all over the country, and we want to do more traveling and slow down a little.”
Some people have mistaken the heavily promoted inventory sale — there were more than 330 customers on its first day on Thursday — for an announcement that Bridgman’s is going out of business. But Dan Rutledge, 62, said he plans to keep going just like four previous generations of his family, although some of the current furniture lines may no longer be carried.
“It will continue, just under sole ownership and not as partners,” Dan Rutledge said. Steve Rutledge said he plans to gradually pull back until the end of the year, when he officially will retire.
After the inventory sale wraps up at the end of May, Dan Rutledge said he will restock Bridgman’s lines of furniture — it has one of the few Stickley showrooms in New England — along with mattresses, carpeting, flooring and other furnishings.
Steve Rutledge said he never really gave serious thought to working anywhere else when he was growing up in Lebanon, where he graduated from Lebanon High School in 1965 before going on to Champlain College in Burlington.
“This is what I felt I was going to do coming out of college and going into the service,” he said. “I liked working with my grandfather and father. It was family.”
Bridgman’s is no discount retailer. The store’s roots are deep in the tradition that furniture is a long-term investment, like a home.
The furniture the store sells — Stickley’s classic Mission line, Lyndon’s Homestead Collection, Thor’s Elegance solid cherry and maple bedsets, Harden parlor chairs, Bradington Young leather couches, up-and-comer Maine furniture maker W.A. Mitchell and Amish craftsmen Barkman and Keystone — represent high-end U.S. manufacturers with price tags that can run into the thousands of dollars for a single piece.
“It’s furniture that parents pass on to their children,” Steve Rutledge said while giving a guided tour of the warren of showrooms inside Bridgman’s two-level, 26,000-square-foot building on the Miracle Mile.
Ironically, however, the best-selling furniture at Bridgman’s is one of the few imported brands from an overseas furniture maker: the modernistic “Stressless” line of colorful leather chairs and foot rests from Norwegian furniture maker Ekornes. Bridgman’s has an entire room of Ekornes chairs and sofas on the lower level.
“Comfort and the design,” Steve Rutledge said in accounting for Ekornes’ popularity, pointing out that the line tends to be favored by younger customers.
Still, although they sell furniture designed and made to last the span of generations, the past 10 years have not been the most comfortable for the business, the brothers acknowledge. The reasons are familiar to anyone who has followed the contraction of traditional brick-and-mortar retail stores: online shopping.
“The big difference is people can buy from the internet,” Dan Rutledge said. “And there are box stores. We also always enjoyed a big second-home business — places around Lake Sunapee and Mount Ascutney — but we’re not as busy from that, either. For us, that was a lot of carpeting and upholstering. It’s generational.”
On the other hand, Dan Rutledge said, there has been a distinct uptick in sales of furniture to baby boomers who are moving into assisted living facilities.
“They are moving out of their homes and downsizing, so they have smaller spaces and need smaller furniture,” he said.
The Rutledge brothers’ policy of favoring quality U.S. manufacturers is exemplified by carrying the line of Shifman mattresses. The Newark, N.J., company, only two years younger than Bridgman’s, employs 38 people who hand-craft mattresses that can cost upward of $10,000.
“Ten years ago, all the mattress companies began making one-sided mattresses, in my view to save money and make more of a profit,” Steve Rutledge said. Although a one-sided mattress ostensibly saves labor because it does not require flipping, Rutledge said he believes it nonetheless is an inferior product, and the store has stuck with selling two-sided mattresses.
Going forward, Steve Rutledge said, Bridgman’s is looking at selling a greater selection of lower-cost furniture to better appeal to a younger generation of buyers who grew up in the world of box stores and online shopping.
Bridgman’s has been at its current location since 1951, when it moved from its store on the green in Lebanon. At the time, the Miracle Mile was practically a wilderness, Steve Rutledge said, with the Flanders and Patch automobile dealership the only other business along the road.
“There was a fruit stand across the way,” he said. “My great-grandmother sat on a tree stump and counted the cars that went by to be sure there was traffic.”
Then, in 1990, the brothers added another wing and a warehouse with a 41-foot-high ceiling. “The zoning wouldn’t allow us to expand the footprint, so we had to build up,” Steve Rutledge said. “We could have gone to 45 feet.”
Steve Rutledge has three daughters, Dan Rutledge has a son and a daughter, and between them they have 14 grandchildren, but it appears that a sixth generation is not interested in taking over the business. The brothers said they are not dismayed. All their adult children have their own careers, they said.
“It’s OK,” Steve Rutledge said. “I’m happy my kids are happy and happy doing what they are doing.”
Dan Rutledge agreed. “They all worked here, but none of them wanted to make it their life’s work. It would have been nice, but as long as your kids are happy and healthy, that’s the important thing.”
Dan Rutledge predicts that Bridgman’s will not have another $2 million inventory clear-out sale until he decides to retire. He realizes that, when that happens, it will mark the end of a legacy.
Bridgman’s “may be looked at as a piece of property and not as a furniture store,” he said. “But hopefully, that’s a few years down the road.”
John Lippman can be reached at 603-727-3219 or jlippman@vnews.com.
