If you’ve ever daydreamed about the perfect office setting and envisioned spending your laboring hours in a lofty, light-filled, timber-framed space surrounded by the heady scents of cedar and maple, the sounds of table saws cutting and wood crackling in a fireplace, then woodworker and bespoke furniture maker Vicco von Voss '91 is living your dream.

In this workshop, the project management system is a traditional black chalkboard. The shop is filled with shelf after shelf of nuts and bolts and blades, the only desk is to the side, directly beneath the mounted horns of an elk, and a somewhat grumpy cat has taken up residence in the corner. It’s a space dedicated to craft and nature.

After decades of honing his art while getting to know the unique qualities of pieces of wood, as well as the trees and land they came from, von Voss is more than just a furniture maker; he is a nationally recognized master craftsman, celebrated for transforming ecologically sourced, locally salvaged wood into museum-quality, functional sculptures. His work—which spans custom furniture, architectural features, and large-scale timber-frame construction—has been featured in publications from The New York Times to Annapolis Home Magazine.

Von Voss’ career, the creation of the singular workshop that supports it, and the refinement of his elegant, artisanal work have been happily centered largely on the Eastern Shore of Maryland and tied to Washington College at nearly every step.

The impressive workshop has a sanctuary vibe. A place where design and intention, vision and value are paramount. It’s not an office. It’s a place where a life’s calling has come home to roost.

“I like my privacy,” explains von Voss, who often spends his days studying cuts of wood until they tell him how they need to be used.

His goal? To highlight the wood’s inherent beauty, teasing out and extrapolating upon the organic patterns of grain and knot. Honoring the life of the trees and transforming their essence into a new, purposeful form. And backed up to a creek halfway between Chestertown and Centreville, he has the quiet and space to do just that.

With Timber, his giant German shepherd, following him around, von Voss’ morning commute is a leisurely stroll past a massive warehouse stuffed with hundreds of on-site-processed Maryland trees to his woodshop. The shop is a stone’s throw from the home he shares with his wife, Jacqui Flisher von Voss ’99, and their daughter. Crafted almost entirely of local, salvaged, and on-site milled lumber, the house is a labor of love designed and built over the years entirely by von Voss and members of his team, and it showcases one of his more hard-won pieces of wood—a maple tree that had been blown by a storm into a swamp 

“It’s the most fun, I guess, most uniquely obtained piece I have,” he recounts. He had to navigate through a chaotic property to reach the tree, then wade into the swamp, attach a cable to the trunk, and winch it out. The swamp maple has been transformed into crooks supporting the summer beam in von Voss’ living room, helping to fortify the structure and support the weight of the second floor.

When the house was featured in The New York Times, it was described as being “more like a giant piece of custom-made furniture than a house.” Its frame is held together entirely with wooden pegs using intricate mortise-and-tenon joinery—no nails required.

For von Voss, the house is the physical embodiment of his design values and serves as perhaps one of the highest expressions of his philosophy of the importance of the line, an artistic approach he adopted during his time as a student at Washington College under the guiding hand of Susan Tessem, professor of art.

“It’s all about the line,” he explains. “I’m always looking at the line when shaping something—the juxtaposition of the masculine and feminine qualities of the pieces, the bold and the soft, the positive and negative. The goal is to showcase the tension between the two. That’s what makes my pieces interesting. They’re living, handmade pieces of art.”

When von Voss approaches a piece of wood he tries to leave his ego out of it. “I listen and try and determine what it is asking me to do, how does it want me to interpret it. This challenge comes through in the line of the tree but also all the way down to the way the grain is growing.”

German-born and raised in America since fifth grade, von Voss’ journey to artisan woodworker and furniture maker is rooted in family heritage and, more surprisingly, Washington College. The family influence includes both his grandfathers—one a forester and woodcarver, the other an architect who worked with Frank Lloyd Wright in post-war Germany. As important was his artistic, scientific, and philosophical development at Washington College.

Von Voss’ path to Washington was serendipitous. On a recommendation from a real estate agent who was helping them purchase some property on the Eastern Shore, his parents checked out the liberal arts college. They deemed Washington’s small size and personalized approach ideal for a student dealing with dyslexia and language challenges. Von Voss agreed and enrolled.

The thinking proved correct. While on campus, his academic choices became the structural framework for von Voss’ career. From Tessem, he absorbed the core aesthetic principle that now defines his brand: the line. Von Voss credits her focus and guidance for shaping his current practice of responding to the wood's inherent form in his pieces.

Von Voss also thrived in chemistry and chose it as his minor. An independent study focusing on the importance of glue in woodworking under the late chemistry professor Frank Creegan provided the technical expertise he would need to hone his craft. He now routinely applies principles of cohesion and adhesion in his work to ensure the structural integrity of every glue-up, a practice von Voss says is critical to keeping the color of the wood intact.

As an undergraduate, von Voss worked over the summers as an assistant waterfront director on campus, which allowed him to build connections with Chestertown residents. Those connections would later be crucial to starting his business.

After graduating in 1991, von Voss completed a rigorous three-year formal carpentry apprenticeship in Hamburg, Germany. While the program instilled technical mastery, his experience in the country cemented his desire to return to the U.S.

“My parents thought, what if I did my carpentry apprenticeship, which was in the direction of the field that I wanted, but at the same time, I also got an opportunity as a young adult to live in Germany, experience Germany,” said von Voss, who had only ever lived in the country as a child. Despite the strong family roots, he decided Germany was not for him. “I knew I wanted to go back to America.”

And so, upon his return, he applied to the MFA program at the Rhode Island School of Design and was promptly rejected. The rejection, though bitter, would serve as a pivotal moment in his career.

“The best thing that ever happened to me was getting rejected for the master’s in fine arts. They told me to work on my portfolio and to reapply. And that is really why I came back to this area,” said von Voss. “I could have moved to where my parents were in Detroit, but I had no interest. So I said to myself, ‘Okay, well, what if I spend the next year working on my portfolio? I could go back to the community that I had built, which is centered around Washington College, and to the people that I have met.’”

He contacted Tessem, who secured him a job assisting with a pottery class on campus, granting him access to the campus workshop—a shop he had helped construct as a student.

“I did that for a year, and I was like, ‘I'm having so much fun. Why would I want to go back to school?’ And next thing I know, I'm renting a [work] space in Chestertown.”

From there, he got to work making art and designing furniture. Eventually, as he spent his days reclaiming and reworking wood from storm-felled trees and aging facades, his desire to make art merged with a dream of living off grid. It occurred to von Voss that paying to rent a workspace as well as a space to live was not financially responsible as a budding artist. So, he built a 110-square-foot cabin to live and work in on the property his parents owned further outside of town. The structure, which had no running water or electricity, was forged almost entirely from reclaimed wood and windows from the old Washington College lofts that were being taken down at the time.

When his parents sold their land, he turned, once again, to his community. He ended up being invited by an elderly couple, the Arkinsons, to move the cabin to their property in the woods outside of Centreville, Maryland. In return, he served as the couple's caretaker.

“Every day I went to their house, took out the trash, brought in whatever groceries or dog food they couldn't. I’d do the recycling on weekends. I gardened and mowed the grass. It became a really interesting relationship. I mean, they became my grandparents,” he recounted. “It was amazing. It was not always easy, you know, we had our challenges, but basically it was the old with the knowledge and the young with the energy.”

Von Voss had originally met Tom Arkinson in a woodworking shop in Centreville. “[Tom] was giving me information, and I was giving him labor. He taught me how to live on the land, how to live off the land, you know,” he said. “He taught me about bees, taught me about gardening, and allowed me to roam. They didn't charge me any rent, and so I lived there for eight and a half years in that cabin.”

Von Voss loved that cabin and speaks of it now with a sense of longing for his time living off-grid in that tiny structure. He waxes nostalgic for the days when he would strike a match and, if he could light his stove, water heater, and lights all before it went out, he knew it would be a good day. Out there, in the quiet, he learned to tell if the tide was high or low in the nearby river simply by smelling the air and listening to the birds. He was, as he calls it, “in-tune” with nature on an almost atomic level. His mental clarity, which was abundant, was aided by the constant companionship of a cat and a goat who sometimes lived in and sometimes outside the tiny cabin with him. Dedicated to his work and learning how to live with the land, he expanded his knowledge of wood treatments, timber framing, and milling, and discovered the unique properties and artistic value of the trees that grew all around him.

As his knowledge grew, von Voss’ connections to the community and reputation as a man of the land did as well. Often, by word of mouth, he received opportunities to reclaim and harvest fallen trees from properties, beams from buildings being dismantled, and accent pieces from buildings about to be torn down. This deep, sustained time on the land was foundational to his aesthetic and ethical practice.

Though he had success for many years regionally, von Voss says his first significant financial breakthrough came from, where else, his Washington College network. He secured a major commission from an alumnus who wanted his help building a house in McLean using timber framing, a job that provided the capital to upgrade his shop to professional-grade equipment. From there he was off to the races, filling his time with custom requests and timber framing jobs all over Maryland.

His custom work, often commissioned for high-end properties like the Magothy River Glass House and the Great Oak Manor, introduces necessary organic curves and warmth. The work is renowned for its scale and detail, ranging from a 12-foot spalted pecan sideboard featured in Garden & Gun to a Fibonacci spiral staircase he created in a private residence, a piece he considers his personal favorite, symbolizing the confluence of natural patterns and mathematical precision.

His business employs a small, dedicated team, and his work continues to be defined by his values and the principles of meticulous craftsmanship and ecological sourcing. Every piece is approached through the dual lenses of scientific rigor and artistic flow he acquired at Washington College. His career is the ultimate expression of how a liberal arts foundation, combined with old-world discipline and craftsmanship, can forge a life's work of profound utility and lasting beauty.

Looking forward, von Voss expects to finish the process of completing a large-scale piece to be installed at Adkins Arboretum. This project, titled "Woodhenge," is an interactive public art installation inspired by ancient stone and timber circles, designed to become a shared space for reflection and education on the Eastern Shore. With a $10,000 planning grant from the Maryland State Arts Council and additional funding from other sources, von Voss is planning to transform six massive slabs from a salvaged Queen Anne's County tree into a cultural landmark. Woodhenge is a powerful embodiment of his design philosophy: honoring the entire life of the tree, exposing visitors to the "raw energy" of being inside the wood, and creating a symbol of resilience and transformation.

Planned for Nancy's Meadow on the north side of the Arboretum property, the installation seeks to be a welcoming focal point, much like the ancient henges that marked astronomical and communal gathering places. As one community member noted, the design will make visitors feel "insignificant, but at the same time connected." The work is moving into its second phase, an extensive fundraiser for the $45,000 needed in construction funds. The project is aiming to be built and open to the public in 2026 or 2027.

While all this is going on, von Voss is finishing up a new wing to his house—a living room and library with nearly panoramic views of his homestead—and preparing to launch a new phase of his business that will make owning a von Voss more attainable than ever. He’s planning on putting his warehouse of reclaimed Maryland wood to work and releasing a line of coffee and dining tables that reflect his design aesthetic yet are affordable and appropriate for nearly every home.

As he prepares for this next phase of his career, von Voss sometimes finds himself reflecting on his craft and how one fateful visit to a small college campus shaped so much of his career and life. His work was not achieved by leaving the Eastern Shore, but by consistently relying on the foundation he built here, and through the care and knowledge given and fostered at Washington College.

“I didn’t even apply to any other schools,” he recalled. “I got accepted, and that was it.”

The cabin von Voss built from pieces of an old Washington building still stands today. After purchasing his own property not far from the Arkinson’s, he moved it on a small truck trailer to where it stands now – in a patch of trees behind his house. He often goes out to it to have a quiet moment or when he needs to think. As he stands on the floorboards he salvaged from his alma mater and looks out on his wood shop and the workers moving about his mill, it occurs to him that, in a way, he never left Washington College. And that seems just fine to him.