I’m Andrew, and every day I get to use my hands and my heart to work with some of the most dynamic, exciting, exceptional and heartfelt people I’ve ever met on amazing projects. I make art, sculpture, and furniture that’s built so thoughtfully, so nice, that your great grandkids will cherish it as much as you do.
Our spaces have such an impact on how we think and feel. Maybe after the last couple years we all really know that. I know the feeling of moving across the country for a job or a love, to an empty white box an a duffle bag of clothes, wanting to make it mine and not wanting to just fill up a landfill with plastic junk in a couple years when it breaks.
I’ve grew up in Missouri, but lived in Chicago, New York and San Francisco, and I like to think everywhere I go I attract positive energy. People who can stand on a Brooklyn roof at the manhattan skyline and say “They might not want me but they better be ready for what we’re going to make”. People who don’t subscribe to the status quo, that are only choices in life are what are given to us. People with the treasures and scars from a life lived as creatively as possible, as curiously as possible, as imaginative as I’ve ever seen.
And these are the kind of people I get to collaborate with. Every day. Expanding, opening my mind, never doing the same thing twice.
When I make a one of a kind piece of furniture for someone, I treat it like fine art. It is fine art. It’s an investigation into our relationship with nature and the natural world. My work has traditional joinery overbuilt to last, wood on wood. Almost every day of my waking life is going through piles of wood, sustainably sourced or reclaimed from buildings or set aside from mill’s as the ‘discards’, to elevate them again to a place of honor and high art.
And most of all, it’s sustainable. Our planet is in crises. Making things out of organic, sustainable and compostable materials isn’t just a nice thing to do, it’s a necessity and for me, a commitment. I couldn’t and wouldn’t do it any other way.
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’m in