How did I get here? 

What’s the fascination with wood?                      

I’m not sure that I know the answer to these questions, at least the first one, anyway. Since my early twenties I have designed and built furniture, pieces for landscaping, folding screens, samurai sword display cases, renovated kitchens and bathrooms, and made planters and gifts for people. As I look back and even forward it’s the design challenge that is at least equally intriguing as the building. 

I come from a family with a sister and a brother that both graduated from the Ontario College of Art and both enjoyed successful careers in their field. I on the other hand spent twenty-five years in computer related business and another twenty years in my own business as a distributor and an independent sales rep selling to bicycle shops throughout Ontario.

After retiring I was looking for something to do. It was about that time that the city converted to the green waste containers and large blue bins that could be wheeled to the curb and collected with little effort through automation. I designed a planter that would take your old “blue box” as an insert and give it some new purpose.

 A small ad that showed this as well as offering custom design for planters and the work soon took off. Well, the custom design side of it took off. Landscape designers, TV producers, rooftop gardeners, apartment dwellers, folks needing raised planters, physiotherapy studios, they all had special requirements and they became 95% of the work.

fascination... 

I think the fascination is as much with the challenge that the design presents, almost like solving a puzzle. For a long time I have admired the simplicity in Arts & Crafts furniture and design. If you study Japanese joinery at all you can’t help but be fascinated, if not overwhelmed and in awe. 

Not that the wood itself is not fascinating in it’s beauty and it’s majesty. Heartwood, sapwood, quarter sawn oak, the smell of some cedar, or a magnificent bit of grain can leave me with a new expense and intrigued with what to do with it. I guess if you spend three weeks in Kyoto, Japan and come home with a piece of wood as a souvenir you’re hooked. If you don’t cook but come back from St. John’s, NFLD with a wooden cooking spoon, you’re hooked. Stand in the middle of a 200 year old Quaker cemetery and look up at the towering 150 foot pines and you are hooked or dead!