Second Look: American Classic: Art and Craft
The owners of this riverfront Connecticut home share a favorite find.
Print
Email
Bookmark
ShareJune 1, 2008
While Robert Lewis was vacationing one summer at the Point, a former Rockefeller great camp in the Adirondack Mountains, he took a spin around Saranac Lake in a Hacker-Craft runabout boat with a mahogany body, twin engines, and two cockpits. "I jotted the name down thinking it would be an appropriate boat for our house in Connecticut," recalls Lewis, whose 18th-century vacation home rests on the Connecticut River ("American Classic").Hacker Boat Company designed the first Hacker-Crafts in Michigan almost 100 years ago. The company fell on hard times after the Great Depression and eventually shuttered. But in 1976, a new group of owners revived the company and began making sand castings of all the original hardware, updating boat designs with modern technologies, and assembling a team of boatwrights skilled in the labor-intensive, old-world techniques required to produce the vessels, each of which is made entirely by hand.
Hacker-Craft boats cost between $150,000 and $250,000. The lead
time is anywhere from six to 12 months, as each boat requires anywhere from
1,500 to 2,500 man-hours to construct. Lewis and his wife, Stacey, pictured
above in a loaner in front of their home, are awaiting delivery of a 32-foot
runabout.
Hacker Boat Company, 866.540.5546,
www.hackerboat.com
