bio

I am a self-taught furniture maker, born and raised in British Columbia. I love building things, particularly those which require precision.

Thus I edged my way from a carpentry background into furniture design and construction. During my early 20's, a few years of custom cabinet-making in Switzerland helped drive the transition.

After returning to Canada and completing a BA at Dalhousie in Halifax, I moved back to Vancouver to more seriously pursue furniture making. Seasonal self-employment in B.C.'s forestry industry during those first years paid for the shop and the tools and allowed me a fair bit of time to work on the skills.

What has become clear is that I get a great deal of satisfaction when hand, tool, and material come together on a piece of furniture. It is very rarely seamless, but I do like to think of it as a type of creative collaboration. There are also many times when process and technique are meaningful ends in themselves.

At the end of the day, though, it is a simple and powerful need, a compulsion really, to make things. It must come from my parents. Both of them continue to always be making things. Like them, I find it both a challenging and a rewarding way of engaging with the world, physically, mentally, and aesthetically.

Beyond that, most ideas come from my ongoing encounters with the many astoundingly deep wells of human creativity, across cultures and through history and evident in everything around us. It is these diverse manifestations of human spirit and enterprise that are my real inspiration.