About
I design and build furniture by hand from a small workshop in Ocean Grove, on the Bellarine Peninsula south of Melbourne. I work alone, mostly in Australian hardwoods and occasionally in imported exotics, making pieces to commission for private clients.
Before this I spent a decade in software — business automation, digital workflows, systems designed to eliminate friction. I was good at it, and miserable. The full account of how that ended is on The Heavy Life. The short version is that I found woodworking, and everything else rearranged around it.
I’m entirely self-taught. I grew up in a household without so much as a screwdriver. What I lack in formal training I’ve made up for in obsessive research, hundreds of hours of prototyping, and a willingness to ruin expensive timber in pursuit of getting something right. The workshop is where I think most clearly, and the work I do there — parquetry, marquetry, straw marquetry, solid wood joinery — is the most demanding and satisfying thing I’ve done with my hands.
The Work
Each piece begins with a commission brief and ends, months later, with a delivery. Between those two points is where the interesting work happens: the design days spent at an empty bench with sharp pencils, the material selection, the technical problem-solving, the slow accumulation of decisions that give a piece its character.
I’m drawn to work that is intricate and difficult. Parquetry and creative veneering interest me most — the precision required, the way geometric patterns interact with the natural figure of the wood, the satisfaction of a seamless joint in material that doesn’t want to cooperate.
Why This Matters
Furniture sets the environment of a home. It ages with us. It bears the marks of our hand, our parents’ hands, our children’s hands. The difference between a handmade piece and even the highest quality mass-produced item is not subtle — it is the accumulation of thousands of small decisions made by a human being who cared about each one.
When you commission a piece from me, there have been no compromises in its construction and no shortcuts taken. It bears the fingerprints of its maker, not the bite marks of a machine. It is built to outlast us both.
Interested in commissioning a piece? Learn about the process →