I grew up in Kansas City, Missouri, spending what felt like every other weekend from five years old to eighteen camping in the Ozarks, climbing mountains in Colorado, and learning to take care of myself in the wilderness. I learned how to split a tree with an axe, and how to hold a carving knife just right so that I get the smoothest, best finish. My great grandfather had a furniture store, though he mostly had coffins, and I always felt at home amongst the prairie pioneers like him, making their own way.

But a country boy longed for the city - and I moved to Chicago for college, and studied fine art in Rome, Italy. I fell in such love! Everyday I would grab some bread and a little bottle of wine, a watercolor set, and go out and paint. I didn’t speak the language hardly, but I knew enough to learn the names of Bernini, Michelangelo, to paint the tomb of Raphael and sit on the steps of Mary Shelley’s apartment on the Spanish steps - which is now over in the glamorous side, the 1960’s Hollywood side of Rome, with it’s row of boutique tailors. Such craftsmanship, such care about design, I never wanted to leave.

I did come home to Chicago, and fell deep into the rabbit hole of the design world. I had worked at a Newspaper as their staff cartoonist, and moved on to making furniture and art for places like Roost and Las Manos Gallery. I bought a screen print press, and made art everyday. Lots of t-shirts of my own designs, lots gig posters for bands playing around.

My day job took me to California with Apple about five years later, and, with all my things still on a truck on the way, I went to Home Depot, a high end lumber mill and In-N-Out the first day I had the keys to an empty apartment and decided to build myself a coffee table. I made a step by step post of how I did it, and posted it on Reddit - where it went viral. I sold that table, and the next one, and the next one. I still didn’t have furniture, but I felt the seeds of a new way forward. I spent all day immersed in the inner creative details of the Apple Store designs, and I would go home and watch a baseball game, and make another table, or carve a bowl, or anything else I needed for myself.

Brooklyn was calling, and with lots of world traveling I kept what I did strictly to hand tools. It was as much a cathartic, therapeutic experience since I could not make very quickly, but it also made me understand why I did what I did, and how I wanted to do it. Saturday afternoons the bar below me would be crowded, and the West Indian guys with their soundsystems blasting outside, I had everything I needed.

After more than a decade as a professional artist, I found a school in California I really liked - The Krenov School of Fine Woodworking, directed by Laura Mays. There I was able to get years and years of experience condensed down quickly - they have an incredible program where you make your own hand planes out of wood, then you make all your projects out of the tools you just made, to the highest level of craftsmanship possible. Really, this was about making art as much as furniture, and I’m grateful I got accepted - hundreds apply, few get in.

Now I have my own shop and studio up in Santa Fe, New Mexico, started in 2022, and I’m making a lot of bathtubs with my brand Redwood Ofuro, and as well as tons of really fun furniture shipping all across the country and around the world.

Please, explore the rest of the website - there’s some answers to frequently asked questions below, and places where you can see what I’ve made in the past, what I have for sale or as starting points for new custom work, art, illustrations, some video, some music, and more. Make yourself at home. I hope you are as lit up and inspired by this as I am, and if so, reach out. I’d love to chat about what we can make together.