But the thread running through all of it—an abiding belief in craft, community, and design in service of human wellbeing—was spun, she will tell you, at Millbrook.
A Connection to Place Wallis grew up on Long Island, a selfdescribed creative who was always painting at home, playing with clay, and building things. She was, by most measures, thriving. She had good friends, earned good grades, and played on a championship softball team, but something about the scale and feel of her public high school left her feeling out of sorts. “I just felt like I was going to an institution,” she recalls. “I remember first period, smelling like the chemicals from the cleaning products in the hallways. I just remember being so bothered by my environment.” It is a detail worth noting: a teenage girl so attuned to her physical surroundings that industrial cleaning solvents gave her heart palpitations. That sensitivity to environment, to how a space feels and what it does to the people inside it, would become the driving force behind her entire career.
suggests. When reflecting on high school,
or building things at home. At Millbrook,
her Millbrook years are what define her
she took Hardy’s class and, as she puts it
educational experience. She remembers her
simply, “fell in love.”
time at Millbrook as being transformative, where she consciously learned what it means to live in a community.
The next step came after she finished her Vth form year when she attended a summer program at Parsons School of Design in
She had grown up in a warm, community-
New York City. She came back to Millbrook
minded household. Her mother, especially,
in the fall of her senior year transformed
was devoted to the local schools, her
and wanting to attend an art school for
garden club, and her neighbors. But it
college. No one in her family had gone
was at Millbrook that the concept of
to art school, and her close friends were
community became something Wallis
applying to traditional academic colleges
could feel and understand for herself. What
and universities. But Mr. Hardy helped
Her father happened to connect with a former
made the difference, she thinks, was the
her put together an art portfolio, and soon
Millbrook faculty member who suggested the
combination of freedom and intimacy the
enough she had applied and was accepted
family take a look at Millbrook. They visited
school offered.
at Parsons. The path from that senior-year
campus, and there was no question that Millbrook was the right place for her.
“It was having autonomy and the challenge of being on your own as a young mind but in
“It was a no-brainer for us—the size, the
this incredible environment, with all these
art studios. I remember seeing some of the
resources. And then parallel to that, tiny
seniors who had their own individual studio
classrooms where you feel safe to explore
spaces. I was just like, how beautiful.”
your ideas and you are truly heard. That was everything. That was my education. That
conversation through Parsons and to the founding of Feronia is not a straight line, but it is certainly a single path.
A Designer’s Journey: Craft, Community, and Making Things Matter
The Gift of Community— and Bill Hardy
And then there was Bill Hardy. Wallis had
and, just as importantly, toward makers.
Wallis attended Millbrook for her final two
always been creative, but she had never,
She was less interested in trend and season
years of high school. She is quick to say
somehow, taken formal art classes, not in
than in the people whose hands produced
that those two years represent something
the way that might have seemed the obvious
things and the knowledge they held. Her
far more substantial than their length
path for someone who was always painting
early work with her sister, Elizabeth, and
was the foundation.”
At Parsons, Wallis gravitated toward textiles
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