This is my most challenging piece to date: a 23-foot long bartop made from solid maple with a custom bullnose edge.
This project required weeks and weeks of work and massive amount of materials, along with untold hours of sanding, laminating, and shaping to achieve the end result.
In the end, it is the centerpiece of a beautiful new bar and restaurant in Toronto’s Parkdale neighbourhood. A location in which I am very proud to have my work displayed. And a great place to pull up a stool and have a pint!
Photo credit: Hector Vasquez / BlogTO
This simple, modern standing desk in walnut was built as part of a new office for an entrepreneur starting her own catering business.
The desk employs a waterfall edge, mitre joint, and a custom 'invisible' bracket which allows the piece to be secured to the wall with no visible hardware whatsoever.
This chunky, textured piece served as a good reminder of those who came before: the lumberjacks and sawmill operators who milled giant slabs of wood and left their fingerprints in the form of saw and axe marks.
I like to think that this piece pays tribute to their efforts and a harder, but perhaps more authentic way of life.
I built this bookcase for a client who was building a library and decided to go all out with a custom piece to start off the room. The piece was 6' tall by 6' wide.
He wanted it to be solid and stately looking, but unique and customizable as his library grows over the years.
The three centre shelves are fixed in place, while the top and bottom shelves rest on adjustable brass pins and can be moved to multiple locations.
The key details that make this piece unique, and in my opinion, beautiful, are the half-blind dovetails used to connect the case, and the integrated sliding bookends which rest in a dovetailed track. This was a concept I had never seen before and as a result it required a lot of experimentation and mocking up, to achieve successfully.
Very proud of this heirloom piece.
This piece was commissioned as a storage solution for a kitchen in a home with maple cabinets and walnut floors.
The main challenge with this piece was in relation to its dimensions. It was essentially a large, square box with two doors on the front. But both the clients and I wanted the piece to be special, to make a statement.
They gave me artistic freedom to make the piece 'pop,' so I decided to employ the maple live-edge panels in the doors to give the piece a unique look that reflected the original profile of the tree it came from. I'm proud of the result.
A Toronto lawyer came to me with a unique challenge. He and his wife own a ski chalet, and several pieces in their bedroom set incorporate birch bark in a folksy style that seems very appropriate in the setting. They were looking for a dresser that could also incorporate birch bark, but also employ a sophisticated, modern style, artistic style and to put my own stamp on the project.
I did some research, harvested the bark, flattened and mounted it to plywood panels, then build a cabinet around the birch drawer fronts, using traditional mortise-and-tenon and frame-and-panel joinery.
It was a once-in-a-lifetime chance to build such a special piece, and to have a client who allowed me artistic freedom within a few parameters.
Our cutting boards, charcuterie boards and cheese boards are always available for order in various wood options.
Prices range from $40 and up.
Building this reclaimed wood vanity for clients in downtown Toronto reminded me that there is something special about giving new life to wood that was hewn 100 years ago, by hand, by men who worked very hard and got little in return. Their fingerprints are all over the materials and I hope the piece pays tribute to their efforts.
The challenges in this piece related to keeping the distressed, reclaimed texture of the wood, but still finding a way to use traditional mortise and tenon joinery techniques -- which usually require perfectly flat and square surfaces.
In the end I think we nailed it. Was very happy with the final product.
I was commissioned to make this as a gift. It was such a fun project. The seat and frame are made from cherry. The interior panels are made from birds-eye maple. I used brass hinges and a hand-made leather retainer lanyard and brass clips.
This 8-foot Siberian elm dining table was a commission for a lawyer in downtown Toronto who wanted a statement piece that would fit his current home, as well as a future home with a large dining room. The table features live edge legs with a wedged through-tenon on the stretcher. I'm really happy with the outcome. Seats 8.
A little cabinet that I'm proud of. The doors, panels, drawer fronts and cabinet itself are Cuban mahogany. The back panel is curly maple, and the drawer sides are crafted from Port Orford cedar. The cabinet itself is dowelled, while the drawers are dovetailed and the doors and back panels employ bridle joints.
This cabinet was built to hold a pipe collection, and the live edge door panels provide ventilation, while evoking the Northern California coastline where the piece was conceived.
These pieces are reproductions of chairs originally designed by Swedish furnituremaker Vidar Malmsten.
This queen-sized, solid walnut bed was built for clients in Toronto. We worked together on the design, complete with a full-sized mock up to get the proportions right, to eventually nail down the final look. The headboard is book-matched walnut. Danish oil finish sealed with polyurethane.
There were unique challenges involved with this project and I am very proud of the final outcome. I threw in the bedside tables, which mount to the wall on a French cleat, as a bonus, using offcuts from the build. The stumps were used for the photo session only.
I built this 30 x 50 dining table for some amazing friends and clients. The top is solid teak, the legs are a teak bent lamination, meaning each leg is comprised of 16 thin layers, or laminations, glued together in two eight-layer sections, and bent over a form. Then each pair of bent pieces is glued to a teak wedge to create the taper and Y-shape.
The design is based on a concept by Bruno Matthson, seen in the book Contemporary Furniture.
A teak entryway/dining table bench with Danish cord. I loved making this piece. Simple yet sophisticated, strong and comfortable, it is equally at home in an entryway or serving as additional seating at a dining table. Seats two.
This project came about so organically. I made the tray as a one-off experiment, then started dreaming about a stand that it could sit on. I posted a sketch of the prospective stand, along with the tray itself, to Instagram, and someone spotted it and commissioned me to make the real thing.
It turned out beautifully and I couldn't be happier to have it in my repertoire.
