About us
About Crossfield
For over twenty-five years, Crossfield Concepts has provided consulting and sold all things stones and minerals:
- large statement pieces
- architectural and landscaping accent stones
- gemstone collectibles
Now we also provide a wide range of gems. In concert with other qualified gemologists, Crossfield offers personalized sessions to bump up your gem expertise, to scan your jewelry collection and to participate in creating new and renovating old jeweled pieces.
We favor colored stones, including lesser-known but more beautiful gems. We are thrilled to introduce clients to less faceted, old-faceted and non-faceted gemstones. We show clients new places to find stones; from mines to dealers to the backrooms of the diamond/gem district.
We have been fortunate to run Crossfield Concepts out of an historic, riverside farm surrounded by a native, wet meadow. At Sun Meadow Farm, we sell farm produce and provide farm spaces for events and woodworking and we board just the right animals. We can help other land owners to gently increase diversity and pollinators in their own natural areas.
The founder of Crossfield Concepts, Laurie Heiss, has devoted much of her free time to non-profits supporting education, conservation and preservation. What started as development writing became grant writing for many non-profits, and eventually she co-authored a book about one of her preservation projects: the charming Merritt Parkway; listed on the National Register of Historic Places. She continues to write ‘Stories from the Farm’, originally for her son but found that a wide audience enjoys anthropomorphic stories about her many beloved farm animals and visiting wildlife.
Our founder
Laurie grew up in the as-yet-undeveloped, Chicago exurbs, near her great-grandmother’s farm, not far from a museum of lapidary arts: a rock museum. She attended college in Connecticut and never left – using her degrees in Field Biology and Anthropology throughout her life. The wet meadow marsh remains her classroom, and has been the site of the National 4th of July butterfly count for 25 years and numerous filed trips. Her appreciation of and interest in other cultures, countries and people has informed her international travel for decades. Her professional career started at IBM where her specialty was in manufacturing, which is how she recognized novel thinking at Creative Output Inc, where she contributed to the most popular business story of all time, The Goal, by Eliyahu Goldratt. Two COI alums and Laurie are tracing the impact of those employees, and all of that enlightened thinking in a new story-in-process. She spent the 80’s and 90’s in consulting and management roles at General Electric, then consulted with her own firm, Crossfield Concepts, Inc.
On the volunteer side of life, Laurie co-headed the elementary and high school PTA’s and in between, led the Arts-in-Educations coalition representing nearly twenty public and private schools in Greenwich, Connecticut for many years. For fifteen years, she served on the board of the Redding Land Trust, managing their accreditation process, land monitoring and major events and served as Vice-President in her fifth term. Along with eight others, she founded the Redding Preservation Society; and also served on the board of the Greenwich Preservation Trust—eventually creating the Fairfield County Preservation Network with two fellow preservationists. She served as the Executive Director and as a board member of the Merritt Parkway Conservancy, culminating in the publication of The Merritt Parkway: The Road that Shaped a Region, with Jill Smyth. With fellow board members, she started a museum dedicated to the Merritt, after leading many high-profile events and producing two short films about the Merritt Parkway. She has also served the Greenwich educational community on the boards of the Greenwich Alliance for Education, the Chinese Language School, Abilis and currently, the Special Education Legal Fund.