He was a student and later a teacher at Yale School of Architecture, where he absorbed the influence of figures like Josef Albers and Louis Kahn. He brought that education back to Vermont and applied it to everything — including an innovative wood-burning stove, a method of casting concrete using ice forms, windmills in the 1970s, and a winter sled you could actually steer. He loved making things, and he dreamed that someday someone would do the business work to take his objects to market.
In 2010, that love of well-made things found its fullest expression in the Madsonian Museum of Industrial Design in Waitsfield, Vermont — a non-profit dedicated to celebrating beautifully designed objects and the people who made them. The museum grew out of decades of collecting: toys, tools, appliances, instruments, vehicles, chairs — anything where engineering and artistry had fused into something you couldn't help but pick up or stare at.
David Sellers passed away in 2025 at the age of 86. The Madsonian Design Group is, in large part, his idea brought to life.
David Sellers, FAIA.
David Sellers spent over 50 years as an architect in Vermont's Mad River Valley, designing and building not just structures but a philosophy. He is widely credited with helping establish the design-build movement — an approach that insists the person who designs something should also be the one who makes it. His homes felt like sculpture. His clients often got chairs, doors, and light fixtures along with their buildings, because to David, a project wasn't finished until every detail was right.
Originally designed in 1934, and called the of Zag chair. This David Sellers version uses internal structure to suppose chair without any fill pieces. Made of Vermont Maple. This is a children’s sized chair.