Heart and Soul — Sophisticated St. Louis

If you’re in the market for a bespoke fly rod, a handmade trunk covered in a Chanel tweed, and a custom-made canoe, you may think you’d have to travel far and wide. You don’t.

By Christy Marshall / Photography by Carmen Troesser

“To him, all good things—trout as well as eternal salvation—come by grace and grace comes by art and art does not come easy."
Norman Maclean, A River Runs Through It

Amelia Tufts and Gabe Batson know all too well about the challenges of art and the passion required to achieve perfection. You can see it in each of their bespoke fly rods; exquisite rod cases, purses and trunks, and their carefully crafted canoes.

You might assume their company is based in, say, Montana.

It’s not.

It’s in Maplewood.

The couple first met 18 years ago in Portland, Oregon. She was working at Voodoo Doughnut with Gabe’s roommate. She grew up in St. Louis; he’s a native of Westchester, New York. She didn’t fish; he did.

“I noticed people were fly fishing and it seemed out there the best way to catch steelhead and trout and the species of fish that were in the rivers we were fishing in,” Gabe says. “I started buying these old books on fly fishing and every single one of them mentioned you have to get a bamboo rod if you’re going to fly fish, because that’s the ultimate in performance.” Then he started to investigate how to make his own.

“Gabe is really a self-taught person,” Amelia says. “He really dives deep when he’s learning about something.” After Gabe lent her a rod and reel, she taught herself how to fish and also started making rods several years later. Their company is Tufts & Batson (tuftsandbatson.com).

The intricacies of making a bamboo rod are “very involved and it takes a million steps,” Amelia says. It took Gabe nearly two years to make his first one in 1999. He met a mentor, a retired high school history teacher from California, who offered to teach him. Then Amelia and Gabe ran into Daryll Whitehead, who had been crafting rods for more than 35 years. They found him in a supply shop turning a piece of mastodon ivory into the reel seat for a fly rod.

“I'm like, this is something interesting,” Amelia recalls. “He saw a desire in us that was there and a willingness to take criticism. We brought everything we had made. And he's like, ‘Well, yeah, if you're serious about making something really good, I would throw these away.’ That was hard.”

In 2008, the couple moved from Portland to Sweet Home, Oregon and for the next five years, learned from Daryll. “We moved down there specifically to learn the craft of making the best fly rods in the world with this mentor,” Gabe says. “He is a really good teacher because he didn't show us by rote, that this is the way it's done. He didn't even show us his own designs until after we were here in St. Louis and were up and running as a company, because he didn't want us to merely imitate how he did things.

“Instead, he just exposed us to the world of bamboo rods and what made this maker great and what made this historical figure important and how it worked,” Gabe continues. “He kind of lifted the curtain on the mechanics and the underlying fundamentals, the principles of bamboo fly rods. He let us pick and choose on our own and learn on our own.”

While they were perfecting their designs for the fly rods, the couple weren’t cottoning to the small-town life of Sweet Home. At the end of 2012, they moved to Maplewood.

“I have family here and old friends who I've stayed in touch with,” Amelia says “It just felt like a really comfortable place to come home to. And, it just turned out to be an amazing move for us.”

The couple’s fly rods caught the eye of fly-fishing guru Carmine Lisella, the owner of Jordan-Mills Rod Co. Until about five years ago, he published small booklets twice a year on the sport. “And then one day I'm reading it and I realized we've got three rods in there, and he's saying all these wonderful things about us,” Gabe says.

“It felt validating,” Amelia says. “That we are really rod makers.” The orders started streaming in by handwritten letters, emails, phone calls, through proxies, direct messaging and friends. The cost of a rod starts at $3,500 and goes up to $10,000. The lead time runs from five months to a year.

The process begins with talking to the client, determining their preferences. “It’s almost like tailoring a suit,” Gabe says. Amelia explains that they ask a series of questions: What does he or she have in mind? What is his or her favorite rod like? What do he or she want to see in a new rod? What isn’t the client getting? What kind of flies do they use? Do they want a slow-action rod or a fast one? Then the couple takes the buyer outside to the neighboring yard and watches them cast a rod.

“We get to know them as a person and what they like, and sometimes that triggers a bit of inspiration in terms of materials,” Gabe says.

The materials include the fabric lining and covering the box holding the rod. “We've purchased vintage saris from India and we made it part of the story of the life of the rod,” Gabe says. “We almost build a history into the rod so that it has that kind of an experience. When you open it, it's almost like an artifact that you're discovering instead of just a brand-new product.”

Starting in 2020, those boxes have led to a second line marketed by Tufts & Batson: what they call trunks and the layperson would be inclined to dub purses, suitcases, and trunks. All of them are stunning purses and suitcases that should either be used on a private plane or put out on display in a house.

The couple makes the purses/trunks out of Kiri wood. “It's the highest weight to strength ratio,” Gabe says, adding it's fireproof, bug proof and warp resistant.

“We want to make sure that every detail is right,” Amelia says. The fabric is from Chanel, the hardware from Paris, and they apply the leather pelts, make the handles and the brackets themselves. The trunks include lingerie drawers. All custom-ordered, the prices start at $2,000 for the small trunks/purses; $8,000 for the trunks.

According to Amelia, clients have bought them for a variety of uses ranging from holding a collection of Hermes scarves or old photos to using the larger trunk as the base for a coffee table. “We build these to last for generations,” she says. “We know their beauty will grow over time.”

But the product line doesn’t stop there. During Covid, the couple decided to start making canoes. Gabe had seen a man holding one in the palm of his hand.

“I was like, that is really cool,” Gabe says. “So, I started investigating how those are made. I ended up meeting someone who teaches how to make them and we started making them. The fun thing that happened is we realized because of our fly-rod experience we could add all sorts of things to the canoes that we didn't see on canoes prior. There was one watershed moment when we were finishing a canoe for a dear friend of ours and I just had this tug within me. I asked Amelia to look at the problem of the gunnels. She convinced me to do the thing that I wanted to do, but dared not to do, which was to cover the gunnels in leather. Then that led to the leather seats and then making the removable floor in the bottom leather, so that every way you interact with the canoe is with this buttery smooth leather. It's durable and it’s beautiful.”

The leather is the same one used for horses’ bridles. The canoe frame is covered in an impregnated fabric that looks like canvas. “We started painting it all these wonderful colors,” Gabe says. “It grows organically.” A one-person canoe only weighs 35 pounds and sells for approximately $3,500; a 15-footerwith two seats retails for $6,000.

The couple’s creativity knows no bounds.

“We're just creative people,” Amelia says. “We can't help ourselves.” The latest venture is perfume, now under development.

“Eventually, we hope to have an entire lifestyle brand including a fragrance and additional accessories, all with the art of travel and adventure in mind,” Amelia says.

“We have a lot of things we still want to do,” Gabe adds. “It would be so wonderful to be able to make those a reality. Part of being able to do that is growing as a business so that we can invest more into making more beautiful things like this.”

Amelia smiled and added, “We really do put our heart and soul in it.”