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.
More recently I’ve become consumed by traditional Chinese furniture construction — the joinery and forms developed during the Ming dynasty, a system so precisely engineered that pieces built six hundred years ago without glue are still standing. I’m translating those forms and techniques into Australian timbers, building what the Ming makers built but in Red Gum, Blackwood, and Silver Ash instead of huanghuali. Nobody else in Australia is doing this work, which is either an opportunity or a cautionary warning. Time will tell which.
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, marquetry, and Chinese joinery interest me most — the precision required, the way a three-way mitre joint conceals its complexity behind a clean surface, the satisfaction of a joint that locks under its own weight.
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 →