Ben Little builds furniture, cabinetry, and architectural metalwork with the conviction that quality should endure
In 2014, Ben Little left his home state of Mississippi for a carpentry fellowship with Landrum Tables in Charleston and began building tables from reclaimed wood and steel. “I was totally green,” he recollects. But, Little was curious—about materials, design, and what he could do differently—and persistent. He continued his education through trial and error and guidance from talented makers he met along the way. Three years later, he opened Benjamin Paul Studio, a solo effort that has since grown into a collaborative workspace at the Charleston Design District with a dozen artisans and a team-first approach. Together, they create fine furniture, cabinetry, and architectural metalwork for clients seeking heirloom-quality pieces built to last generations.
Today, curiosity still drives the studio, while beauty, simplicity, and versatility guide every project. “The objective is always beauty and elegance in anything we build,” Little explains. “The project’s complexity doesn’t change the standard of the final outcome. It has to sing.” He describes their disciplines—furniture, millwork, and metalwork—as “fingers of a fist, craftsmanship being the fist.” The work is entirely custom and commission-based, spanning cabinetry, dining tables, and case goods for residential clients to large-scale millwork and metal installations for restaurants and hotels.
Material choices carry an ethical weight for Little and his team. Domestic hardwoods approved by the Forest Stewardship Council are a priority, and clients are steered toward aluminum wherever possible, given its almost infinite recyclability. Offcuts are collected in a corner of the shop, where artists can take material free of charge. Recently, the studio joined a “repair fair” sponsored by Wake Refill. “It was this beautiful expression of community where people from all walks of life brought their old and worn items to us for repair,” Little says. Being “a good ancestor,” he explains, means choosing the best materials and joinery techniques while remaining conscious of what happens to them afterward—building well and repairing what already exists will keep objects out of landfills.
Before a single piece of wood is cut, the studio develops photorealistic renderings and technical shop drawings for each project. As Charleston’s appetite for custom design has grown, so has the scale and sophistication of the commissions. One project Little remains especially fond of is the unlacquered brass shelving behind the bar at The Ordinary. “It’s a joy going there and seeing how that brass has aged with time,” he says. “I love to imagine the life and stories that have taken place around those pieces, really all of our pieces.”
Long Game: Ben Little lives by this mantra: “We tend to overestimate what we can accomplish in one year, but we underestimate what we can accomplish in 10.” May marked the studio’s 10th anniversary.
Client List: The studio has built custom pieces for noted interior designers, including Betsy Berry, Hunter Floyd, and JLV Creative.
Material Palette: Domestic hardwoods, aluminum, unlacquered brass, leather, ceramics, and mixed metals
Full House: The team has taken on whole-home projects, producing furniture, millwork, and architectural metalwork under one roof.
Learn More: www.benjaminpaulstudio.com
Robert Thomas carries Charleston’s most storied trade into the present, forging architectural and sculptural ironwork the old-fashioned way
Robert Thomas didn’t set out to become a blacksmith. The Pennsylvania native was studying finance when he decided he wanted to make something tangible instead of “moving paper around.” Having learned to weld while repairing railings for his township parks department, he was drawn to the oldworld craft, pursuing blacksmithing apprenticeships across the US and Europe and earning a degree from the National School of Blacksmithing in Hereford, England.
In 2008, living in Charleston, Thomas read a Post and Courier article about legendary local ironsmith Philip Simmons. “I never felt like I worked a day in my life,” Simmons told the reporter. Inspired, Thomas bought a forge and an anvil, set up shop in a one-car West Ashley garage, and began practicing with hand-forged hooks.
Seventeen years later, Robert Thomas Iron Design (RTID) operates a full-scale forge at the Navy Yard Charleston’s Design District. A team of 30 blacksmiths and artisans produces everything from custom gates and railings to sculptural furniture, decorative hardware, and carbon-steel cookware. “There aren’t enough of them in this country, or the world, for what we’re trying to do,” he says of the skilled professionals. “We have to train people. We bring in those who are interested in the craft and take them on a journey to become really good at it.” It’s not lost on Thomas that his career was made possible by Simmons. “I know that he paved the way for me to do this.”
Thomas describes his approach as traditional blacksmithing applied to contemporary design. On the historic peninsula—where the City’s Board of Architectural Review and Preservation Society of Charleston scrutinize additions to the streetscape—his work draws heavily from historic precedent. However, he does incorporate details that feel distinctly his own. “Whenever possible, I add an embellishment that feels uniquely ours and leave our signature,” he explains. “That way, in 100 years, the same way I can walk around now and tell where a piece came from, somebody could look at our work and know.”
Few commissions carry the emotional weight of the ironwork Thomas and his team created for Woodland Cemetery at Clemson University last year. Positioned near the unmarked graves of enslaved people and visible to more than 80,000 football fans on game days from the shadow of Memorial Stadium’s “Death Valley,” the gates mark a newly revealed entrance to the site. “The design has symbolism throughout—root structures that grow into a tree, which grows into a floral arrangement at the top, symbolizing new life,” Thomas says.
RTID also manufactures carbon-steel cookware for Charleston-based Smithey Ironware Company, a line that complements its custom commissions. Each pan begins as a raw slab of steel at one end of the Navy Yard forge and emerges as a one-of-a-kind piece of cookware—no two are identical, even among thousands produced. For Thomas, each of the 30 steps required to craft a pan also serves as training for more complex architectural work. “I want thousands of opportunities for people to interact with hand-forged ironwork,” he says.
In the Blood: Robert Thomas’s mother, Angela Trotta Thomas, is a professional artist represented by Reinert Fine Art Gallery downtown. His father is an engineer.
Heavy Lifting: The gates and fencing for Woodland Cemetery at Clemson University required several tons of steel and a year of fabrication.
School of Hard Knocks: The studio partners with the American College of the Building Arts to help train the next generation of blacksmiths through internships and apprenticeships.
On the Shelf: Check out Thomas’s coffee-table book, The Art & Craft of the Blacksmith: Techniques and Inspiration for the Modern Smith (Quarry Books, 2018).
Learn More: www.robertthomasiron.com
From marsh flats to seashells, Jordan Connelly channels Lowcountry motifs into artful interiors
At dusk on a Lowcountry marsh flat, the spartina burns copper, a great egret picks its way through gilded shallows, a pointer holds rigid at the cordgrass edge, and a drake mallard lifts from the water, wings cupped against the fading light. These are Jordan Connelly’s subjects, and the Raleigh, North Carolina, native has spent the past decade finding ways to bring the Lowcountry landscape indoors. “There’s a palpable, living beauty here,” she says. “I can visit the same place at the same time of day and season, and it never looks the same.”
What began as a small creative venture in 2018 has evolved into a full studio operation. Connelly primarily sells online, with an exclusive capsule wallpaper collection created for Anthropologie and licensed artwork featured at Pottery Barn Kids. And she occasionally pops up in-person, staging a solo exhibition inside a downtown home last year.
Connelly, who holds degrees in studio art and biology from the College of Charleston, along with a doctorate of nursing practice, sees clear connections among those disciplines. “Studying biology trained me to see patterns, systems, and the intelligence and gifts that nature offers,” she says. “My time in health care deepened my sensitivity to people, emotion, and the need for spaces that feel calming and restorative.” That perspective shapes her work. “There’s an intention behind creating designs that bring peace, connection, and grounding,” Connelly says. “The gift of being an artist is that I get to steer the viewer’s eye to what matters—the beauty of life and what’s around us.”
In her Mount Pleasant studio, Connelly creates original paintings, commissions, and hand-painted patterns, many of which she translates to wallpaper, fabric, pillows, fine-art prints, and a new bedding line, with all wallpaper and textiles crafted in South Carolina and Georgia. The decision to source regionally was intentional, as she says closer mill relationships allow for quality oversight and more responsible production. “It’s important how the products are created,” she adds. “If I’m painting and drawing inspiration from the natural world, I also feel a responsibility to help protect it.”
Her wallpaper designs begin as hand-painted originals created directly on wallpaper ground material. Connelly then cuts the large-scale work into nine-by-12-inch pieces, scans each section at high resolution, and digitally stitches them back together before sending the final design to print. “People think my wallpaper is directly painted on the wall,” she says, but the hand-wrought effect is something digital illustration alone can’t replicate. “You’re getting the same unique, painterly feel at a more affordable price.”
When asked what living artfully looks like in practice, Connelly—who built this business while raising three kids—doesn’t hesitate. “It’s not about perfection or aesthetics alone,” she says. “It’s about intention: creating a home that’s meaningful, slowing down enough to notice beauty in everyday moments, and building a life that reflects what you care about.”
Fresh Sheets: Connelly’s bedding line uses long-staple American cotton woven in percale and finished with water-based dyes and PFAS-free treatments. Each order includes a four-by-four-inch, fine-art giclée print.
Family Affair: Her brother—a hunter and physician at the Medical University of South Carolina—inspired her sporting dog patterns, while her fish motifs draw from her own time on the water as an avid angler.
Good Cause: For each bedding item sold, Connelly donates $1 to Charleston Waterkeeper, a nonprofit that protects and restores the region’s waterways.
Up Next: The company will soon be launching drapes and furniture—all handmade in the Carolinas.
Learn More: www.jordanconnelly.com
Setting out to create products they wanted as Mac users, Andrew and Leigh Ann Green founded Twelve South around a dining room table in Mount Pleasant’s I’On neighborhood. Launching the company in 2009, the couple began with a vertical laptop stand, a monitor shelf, and the “BookBook,” a now-iconic leather MacBook cover. Seventeen years later, the company has expanded well beyond Apple accessories with products, like the best-selling “AirFly” Bluetooth travel adapter, as well as a new CEO, Diego Nunez, who describes the brand’s future as “an invitation to a better way of living.”
Green, the cofounder and chief creative officer, previously designed products for Griffin Technology and Charleston-based DLO, now part of the Philips group. His process is driven by instinct and prototyping. Ideas arrive in the shower, get sketched on napkins, and become foam-core models long before anyone opens a CAD program. “At the beginning of a product concept, I want to feel it as fast as possible,” says Green, who created a four-piece, foam-core mock-up that ultimately led to the “ButterFly SE,” a folding two-in-one charger launched in 2023.
Nunez, who studied at ArtCenter College of Design in Pasadena, California, and was an early employee at Beats Electronics, says his first priority was understanding Green’s vision and “distilling the DNA of what defines Twelve South” as the company scales. The goal, he says, was to prove that “even though we’ve made an impact in the Apple world, there’s a much bigger company here that can stay rooted in Charleston, while expanding what we’re about.”
A recent product, the “Valet” charging station, signals where the brand is headed. Wrapped in leather and designed to rest unobtrusively on a nightstand or entryway console, it reads more as a home object than a tech accessory. “It was a conscious decision to take a technology product that lives in your home and turn it into a home product,” Green explains. “Our customers want stuff that blends into their homes, not just another chunk of plastic.” The Valet’s low, flat profile is intentional. “People are trying to disconnect from devices at home,” says Nunez. “You can leave your phone and walk away from it. There’s a ritual to it that’s very comforting.”
Charleston continues to shape the company in ways both subtle and significant. Removed from the tech bubbles of Silicon Valley and Hong Kong, the team of 27 based at the Pacific Box & Crate headquarters is able to “see things a little differently,” Green says. Even the brand’s lifestyle photography reflects that perspective, shot in subtropical light, around the Lowcountry. “When you look at our product shots, you see Charleston’s influence,” he says. “It’s completely different from the generic stuff our competitors do.” For Nunez, the city’s strong sense of place is both an inspiration and an aspiration for the brand.
Humble Origins: Andrew and Leigh Ann Green’s first office was above what is now Saint Urban’s wine bar in the I’On neighborhood of Mount Pleasant.
Best in Show: The “AirFly,” an adapter that connects wireless headphones to in-flight audio jacks, is Twelve South’s biggest hit to date, and the number-one-selling Bluetooth adapter in the world.
Home Base: Wrapped in leather and designed to lie flat, the “Valet” charging station is built to blend seamlessly into the home.
By the Numbers: Twelve South has products for sale in every Apple store in the world.
Learn More: www.twelvesouth.com
Ann Yancy threads sculptural instinct through every bead, rattan strand, and hand-wrapped frame produced in her studio
The first thing Ann Yancy will tell you is that she is not a businesswoman. “I was trained as an artist, not a business major,” she says. “Every aspect of what I design comes from that experience.” Yancy earned a bachelor’s of fine art from the Maine College of Art, where she studied sculpture, metalsmithing, and jewelry-making—disciplines that shaped her appreciation for proportion, materiality, and handcrafted detail. What began as a jewelry design career in New York City eventually evolved into lighting design, where the same fine-art sensibility could shape an entire room. She has spent the decades since proving that artistic instincts translate beautifully into the world of luxury interiors.
Yancy grew up between Nashville; Asheville, North Carolina; and Charleston, before eventually returning to the Holy City, where she established Ro Sham Beaux in 2010. Her studio produces fixtures that move like jewelry with considered weight, textures, and details that invite touch. Beyond lighting, the home collection includes furniture, pillows and poufs, hand-welded aluminum outdoor seating, and case goods such as the “Bertini” bar cart and “Francesca” bar cabinet.
These days, her clientele extends far beyond the peninsula. Drawn to Yancy’s Charleston-meets-Venice Beach-meets-Paris aesthetic, clients span the East Coast, Los Angeles, and Texas, as well as Europe, Australia, and a current project in Dubai. “We manufacture in Charleston, and we’re based here. This is our headquarters,” she says, “but our clientele is everywhere. We’re worldwide now.”
The Ro Sham Beaux process begins, as all good design does, with imagination. “It starts with a dream or a need for something that isn’t in the marketplace,” Yancy says. Working primarily through interior designers, her team translates a client’s ideas into scaled fixtures. “We can make anything to any size,” she says. “It just comes down to the client’s vision.”
The line distinguishes itself through eco-conscious materials, including semiprecious stones, hemp, recycled glass, and rattan, each selected for the way it interacts with light. Custom bead and frame combinations are developed in person at the Charleston studio’s bead bar on Morrison Drive, a hands-on experience replicated in Ro Sham Beaux’s West Palm Beach showroom.
Yancy also pioneered the now-signature technique of wrapping fixture frames in hemp and jute, a process that helped establish Ro Sham Beaux’s distinct visual language and continues to anchor strong wholesale partnerships with Serena & Lily and other brands.
Two additional showroom locations—still confidential—are planned over the next two spring seasons. “The designers in our high-traffic markets will have a place to go to see things in person,” Yancy says. Even as the brand expands, Yancy’s work remains grounded in the handcrafted approach that shaped her as an artist.
Dream Big: The largest Ro Sham Beaux commission to date measures 10 feet in diameter and hangs 20 feet high, custom-built for a casino.
Signature Move: In 2010, Yancy began wrapping fixture frames in hemp and jute, a technique now replicated worldwide.
On the Road: Two new showroom locations are planned over the next two spring seasons, joining the outpost in West Palm Beach, Florida.
Pop-Up Alert: Ro Sham Beaux is heading to the Hamptons for a summer pop-up.
Coming Soon: A fall collection incorporating leather, rattan, and beads is in the works, with cement and marble pieces to follow in winter.
More: www.ro-sham-beaux.com
