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Holler- noun: Appalachian dialect of the word ‘hollow’ meaning a small, quiet valley between mountains, and verb: to shout or proclaim loudly.

HollerDesign is a collaboration of husband and wife team Matt and Melissa Alexander, two southerners who have left home and returned with an imperative of what it means to be southern, and a desire to share that view with others.

Our office and workshop are located on Matt’s family farm in rural Tennessee. Here we focus on creating objects and spaces that are regionally influenced and culturally significant. Our work embodies a core of southern values, including resourcefulness, self-reliance, and just plain old ingenuity. We are inspired by the late demographer Calvin Beale’s view of the south: not “barefooted hillbillies given to moon shining and quite disinclined to work for a living,” but that we southerners are “inclined to self-sufficiency and simple living, [with a] widespread interest in environmentalism, conservation, alternative fuel sources, rural aesthetic values, home food production, and local self-government.”

The work of HollerDesign is inspired by rural forms and textures, yet is augmented by a lens of contemporary manufacturing. Our work is not simply a romanticized view of southern objects, but a reinterpretation and recreation based on both our unique design sensibilities, and the economies of contemporary manufacturing. Our objects exhibit a “love of making,” retain a subsequent intrinsic value, and utilize a production process that is inherently sustainable, but which is grounded more in the tradition of craft than in the ‘green-washing’ of current systems of manufacturing.