Twenty-four years after leaving Ireland, the glass-maker Simon Pearce has a shop on Fifth Avenue, among others, and sales of €30 million a year. Ian Kilroy meets him at his mill and studio in Vermont
There is an outward serenity to Simon Pearce; but it hides a burning ambition. His serenity is understandable. He lives amid the soft, leafy tranquillity of Vermont. As for his ambition, it comes from a lifetime of striving to make it in the business of designing glass and pottery. This is the enterprise that has made him a household name in the US, made him a wealthy man, and brought him on a journey that starts in east Cork and ends - well, who knows where?
On the banks of the Ottaquechee river in Vermont, Simon Pearce has built himself a little piece of heaven. Near a classic New England covered bridge, his mill rests on the bank of the river, with the water crashing below. It's the power of the river that generates the electricity for his business: the manufacture of high quality, finely designed, uncut glass.
With the making of glass complemented by his pottery business, Pearce has set up a great tourist attraction in Vermont. People come here all year round to see the glass-blowers ply their skilful trade, watch the potters conjure graceful forms from their spinning wheels, and to enjoy fine food and wine at the excellent restaurant overlooking the river while they're at it.
"In terms of countryside, you can't get anywhere more beautiful than Vermont," says Pearce, looking out at the river. "It's as beautiful as lots of places in Ireland."
Although he and his wife Pia only set up their business in the tiny village of Quechee in 1981, Pearce's is a story that goes back, not only to Ireland, but to the generation before, when his father moved to Shanagarry in Co Cork, to work as a potter.
Philip Pearce was escaping the rat race in London when he and his Welsh wife Lucy moved to Cork. Simon was already four years old when they moved, and the idea was to go into farming, in partnership with Ivan Allen, of Ballymaloe House. When the farming didn't work out, Ivan Allen and Philip Pearce went their separate ways. Ballymaloe House evolved into the fine restaurant it is today. In a house two miles away, Philip settled his young family, and started a thriving pottery business.
Little did Philip Pearce know what he was starting - that a few decades later one of his sons would be the famed potter Stephen Pearce, with the other son going on to be a great glass maker, first in Kilkenny, then later in the United States.
"We really had a wonderful childhood in Co Cork," says Pearce. "It was a really simple sort of life - no car, no phone, we didn't even have a refrigerator. My parents had a wonderful philosophy of life. They were really into the alternative lifestyle. They were kind of radical for their day, in not wanting to do the mainstream thing."
With his father a potter, Pearce grew up in a creative atmosphere. And both parents were passionate about design. "We were surrounded by beautiful things as we grew up. They did up the house beautifully and bought some beautiful Scandinavian furniture, at the time when it was at its peak. They believed that the design of everything you used was very important - even if it was just a simple egg cup."
Today Pearce credits Scandinavian design as "a big influence", but he also recognises the influence of the simple native designs he saw in east Cork when he was growing up. "I think the early Irish things had a lot of influence on me. The things the farmers used - pots from Youghal, those were a huge influence. We had them around us. The simple furniture from Ireland, the simple metalwork - all those things sank in and influenced my design."
In the beginning, that passion for design found its form in pottery. Pearce went to Newtown Quaker secondary school in Waterford. A poor student, with undiagnosed dyslexia, he was expelled from school at age 16 - he was considered "a bad influence", he says. It was then he joined his father in Shanagarry Pottery, learning the trade, making his first accomplished pieces. From the beginning, a few key concepts were at the heart of his approach.
"My concept has always really been the same. The design philosophy has always been simple and functional. It has to work as well as look beautiful. Simplicity and functionality are the key things that drive my design."
After a year at Shanagarry Pottery, a period of travel followed. He boarded a cargo ship bound for New Zealand and spent two years there working as a potter. Then he met up with his brother Stephen in Japan and travelled back to Ireland via Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, India, Burma, and through Afghanistan, Iran and Iraq. Along the way, he looked at pottery where he could, then it was back to Shanagarry for another spell. But he found his interest was drifting away from earthenware and into glass.
"I started to get interested in old glass. At the time [late 1960s] everyone was getting into pottery, there was something of a revival. It wasn't that I didn't like the pottery; I did. It's just I wanted to do something different."
Pearce was unimpressed with the sterility of Scandinavian glass at the time. He wanted to make clear, quality glass again, glass with character and inspired by the old glass he had begun collecting around that time.
The only problem was he knew next to nothing about how to make glass. So, displaying the drive that has characterised his career, he set about the long journey of learning.
Waterford Glass didn't want him, he says, but he managed to get into the Royal College of Art in London. Because of his lack of academic achievement, he could only attend the college without accreditation, not as a full student. But he was frustrated that he was learning little in London, and so began a long journey around Europe, from glass factory to glass factory, in a driven quest to learn the trade.
"Yes, I was driven," says Pearce. "I really wanted to get on with my life. I had the drive to be successful, to make money." That drive brought him to Amsterdam, Italy, Denmark and Sweden. Along the way, he learned bits and pieces, talking his way into jobs as he went. In Venice he did little but watch the glass-blowers, his job being mainly to carry glass to the masters and make a half-and-half mixture of white wine and cola, which the hardy Venetian glass-blowers drank all day."At the end of the day, they'd stagger out," remembers Pearce. "The working conditions were incredibly hot, but they were the most skilful people I ever saw work glass." In Sweden he made real progress, attending a glass school where he learned more about the trade.
By the early 1970s, he was ready to settle down again, and to work in Ireland. With £10,000 given to him as his inheritance by his father, and a £5,000 grant from the IDA, he built his first glass factory at Bennettsbridge, Co Kilkenny. He remained there for the next 10 years, despite the struggle that the first few years entailed.
"Every Friday I had the bank manager call me up and say he was going to call the loan and close us down. Really, the first five years were an unbelievable struggle," says Pearce. But another sympathetic bank manager helped him through the rough period and soon he found himself with a thriving trade, with shops around Ireland and a healthy mail order business to the US. "And then I decided to leave," he says plainly, "just when it was going well."
While serene now about the reasons for his departure, Pearce says he was very angry when he left Ireland in 1980. Even 24 years later, there is the ghost of that anger as he speaks about it now. "I was just getting very very frustrated with the bureaucracy of trying to run a business in Ireland," he says.
"I found that all my energy was going into dealing with things I felt I shouldn't have to deal with. If I wanted to dial Dublin, I would dial 10 times on average before the call would go through. I asked for a second line and they laughed at me. And the PAYE system ... well, it was so antiquated."
While Pearce says that these days some things in Ireland run better than in the US, at that time he decided that he had to leave. "It was sad," he says. "Because I love the country and I love the people. I was pretty angry at the reasons I was having to go."
Pearce says the decision was a "quality of life issue". He wanted to design glass, make glass, not deal with bureaucrats all day long. America seemed like the logical destination. His wife, Pia, was from New Jersey, and his experience of the way Americans did business was positive. Pearce was 32 years old at the time. Ireland drifted towards bankruptcy. The price of oil was making business very expensive.
Pearce knew what he was looking for when he decided to relocate. "There were three things I was determined to have: somewhere beautiful to live and work; somewhere I could run a good retail business, and somewhere I could make my own electricity, to counter the price of oil."
A long and convoluted search led him to an abandoned mill in Quechee, Vermont - which, in what he describes as "the best negotiation of my life", he convinced the seller to sell to him cheaper than to three Boston bankers, who were competing with him in the sale. "We lived upstairs in the loft. We started to make glass, then opened a shop. Then three or four years later, we started a little restaurant to make it more of a destination."
After about five years, the business really began to grow. Now Simon Pearce's glass and pottery mill is one of the leading tourist destinations in Vermont. He employs 350 people and the business makes sales of $30 million a year. He built a second glass and pottery factory, then outgrew that and built another in Maryland. He has shops around the US in prestigious locations including New York's Fifth Avenue, and he has built a replica of the Vermont operation near Philadelphia. Simon Pearce glass is now carried by all the best and most prestigious design shops across the US. In short, the risk of moving has paid off.
Pearce has clearly attained his goal of making money and of making some of the best glass that can be found. Indeed, you could say he's one of our most successful exports, although his name is little known at home. "I'm not known at all in Ireland now," says Pearce. "But people in their 50s who like good design would remember me from the 1970s. Young people wouldn't know my work at all." Strange, considering Simon Pearce is becoming a household name in the United States.
Now Pearce divides his time between his second home in Vermont - he uses his first home as his design studio - and his third property in the Bahamas, where he likes to spend a few weeks a year. One of his principal interests these days is Buddhist meditation, and when we spoke he had just returned from a four-day fast and vision quest in the Utah desert.
"My wife calls it a mid-life crisis," he jokes. "I was hell-bent on growth and making money and all that for years. Then, one day, suddenly, I said, this is not making me happy. I'm no happier now than I was when I had nothing. So I kind of had an awakening, pulled back from the business and went off on a spiritual journey - looking inwards instead of out."
He says much of his bitterness about Ireland is gone. Now at 57, with his four sons pretty much grown up, he plans to make more trips home.
"I can't believe I haven't been in Dublin for 15 years," he says. Well, when you've built yourself a little bit of heaven somewhere, it is hard to leave.
www.simonpearce.com