Around Town

Did You Hear … ?

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The Traffic Calming Work Group this week released the following data captured by speed sentries in New Canaan. The following figures represent the 85th percentile of speeds among all motorists—the standard used in determining whether motorists are driving too fast. Dan’s Highway—29.6 mph (eastbound), 28.4 mph (westbound)
Gerdes Road—33.6 mph (eastbound), 31.8 mph (westbound)
Oenoke Ridge Road—41.4 mph (southbound)

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Talented New Canaan High School graduate Thomas Throop, furniture maker of Grove Street and owner of Black Creek Designs, is exhibiting at the Architectural Digest Design Show in New York City this weekend. ***

New Canaan Police made two pot busts on Wednesday. At 3:43 p.m., a 32-year-old Norwalk man was cited for possession of marijuana and possession of drug paraphernalia after he in advertently activated a burglar alarm at New Canaan Library.

Business

Thomas Throop, Furniture Maker: NCHS ’82 Grad a Hidden Gem on Grove Street

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Thomas Throop left New Canaan in 1982, heading off after high school to Connecticut College, where he earned an economics degree. He would return 25 years later, a master furniture maker. “It’s been a long and winding road,” Throop, 50, said on a recent morning, apron tied in back as he stood amid the sawdust here in his workspace at Black Creek Designs. About 1,100 square feet on the ground floor of an inconspicuous building set back from Grove Street that includes an apartment above, this workshop is where Throop (pronounced ‘Troop’)—with a young, healthy, handsome Vizsla called ‘Primo’ by his side—spends about 10 hours per day, five or six days a week imagining, designing, shaping, testing, tweaking, building and ultimately producing about 15 to 20 pieces of furniture each year, for clients as far away as California and Arkansas. The nephew of a boat-builder with whom he spent summers in upstate New York while working his way through West School, Saxe Middle School and New Canaan High School (“[My uncle] gave me the sense of building things was an interesting thing to do”), Throop angled steadily toward his profession—which blessedly doubles as his intellectual interest, creative passion and vocation—first creating furniture while working in house restoration, then earning a place at a highly competitive two-year program in England, and finally settling back in the northeast (he lives in Rowayton with his wife, another New Canaanite, Kelley Franco, whom he’d met in Hartford).