About

Greetings, and thank you for finding your way to my site. A little about me: I am a woodworker, homesteader, and amateur forester, and have lived on 33 wooded acres in central New York since 2003. My work with wood stems from a childhood fascination with trees and forests, and has evolved in parallel with efforts to practice and demonstrate low-tech, low-impact, sustainable woodland management on my own land. Accordingly, near all of the furniture, cabinetry, and other woodwork I produce utilizes lumber from the forests that surround me, often from trees felled in my own woodlot.

As a self-taught woodworker, I have been influenced by a great number of craftspeople and woodworking styles, and by the incredible wealth of skills and design left to us by countless generations of workers of wood around the world,  but my most profound influence is invariably the wood in hand at any given moment, as the unique characteristics of each log or board—colors, grain patterning, knots, wounds, decay, or other ‘defects’— ultimately dictate my approach to each piece.

Philosophically, my aim is to create with wood in as holistic a manner as possible, from standing tree to finished product, and to create work that will stand the test of time. While machinery serves an integral role in my woodworking shop, my dovetails are hand-cut, and much of the shaping of wood is done with hand tools; whenever possible, surfaces are hand-planed to reveal a deep, natural luster often obscured in mass-produced furniture.

In combining traditional handcraft with unique, carefully selected and matched lumber, my work aims  to reflect a balance between mind and nature, and a quiet integrity, with a minimally adorned, natural presence and character. Most often, I utilize natural, non-toxic linseed oil, shellac, and beeswax in wood finishing, which enhance the visual beauty of the wood, and offer protection without obscuring its tactile qualities. When certain pieces call for more protection, such as tabletops, my finish of choice is hand-applied polyurethane—many thin coats that build to a low-luster sheen.

For those living in the immediate area (I live 15 miles south of Ithaca, New York), in addition to furniture and woodwork, I periodically take on custom carpentry and timberframing projects, time permitting, and serve both as a volunteer consultant with the New York Master Forest Owner (MFO) program, and as the managing editor of The New York Forest Owner magazine, a publication of the New York Forest Owners Association (NYFOA). Feel free to contact me to discuss possibilities for custom work, and/or to answer any questions you may have with regard to all of the above.

I usually have a miscellaneous inventory of completed woodwork on hand (feel free to inquire), and I also build and try to maintain a small inventory of white pine coffins for natural burial services in my immediate area (local delivery only for these).

Lastly, feel free to read, subscribe to, and comment on my blog, where I offer occasional musings on woodworking, forestry, homesteading, Buddhism, ecology, and other topics. I look forward to hearing from you.