"Wouldn't it be cool if we opened our own gallery?"

That question — somewhere between the beginning of us and the beginning of this — is where DaVallia started. In 2002, we left Southern California for Vermont on what we can honestly only describe as a beautiful whim: a decision to reinvent our lives, slow down, and figure out what it meant to truly live well.

We bought 10 acres of raw land and built our first home entirely by hand. Cut the trees ourselves. Milled the timber on-site. Ran the electrical and plumbing, framed the walls, designed a passive solar system — right down to the Finnish contra-flow heater we built from scratch. Every detail, from the roof to the trim, was ours. That project — and everything we discovered about material, space, and the way a home makes you feel — became the foundation for everything that followed.

By 2005, Jessie was running Fiddlehead Studio, a wholesale jewelry label that placed her work in galleries and boutiques across the country. And somewhere between all of it, we kept coming back to that question.

In 2009, DaVallia opened its doors on Chester's village green.

Since then, the gallery has moved to a 200-year-old farmhouse in Chester's historic Stone Village — a place we've been renovating, shaping, and filling with life for over a decade. We've carved gardens into the landscape, built outdoor rooms, and raised our son Hayden here. Every corner of this place has been shaped by intention. It is our home, our studios, and our ongoing creative experiment.

Our hope has always been the same: that when you walk through, you can imagine it. Your walls. Your table. A home filled with handmade things and original art — collected, not decorated.

That's artful living. That's DaVallia.