5 Custom Wood Pieces Your Home Craves

Most furniture in most homes came off a mass production line. Same table, same finish, same 40,000 other houses. People buy it because it's what's available at scale, and there's nothing wrong with that. It just means most of what's in your house wasn't actually built for your house.

Every custom furniture project I build here in Los Angeles is its own kind of journey, each one weaving in new memories and testing my skill and expertise in a different way.

Here are five custom wood pieces I'm especially proud of this year, along with what actually happened building each one, the parts that almost didn't work, and why I think we should build you something just as astounding and specific. 

Everything I make is handcrafted and custom, so there's no menu here, which is exactly the point. If any of these start crafting a creative vision in your mind, let's workshop it together and come up with something extraordinary.

1. Bar & Swivel Bar Stools

This one had to fit a room on the complete opposite side of the country, which is a strange thing to build around. I brought in my friend Shane Bowman of Bow the Maker, who flew down from Toronto and spent a few weeks in LA with me, trading feet of snow for oranges off my neighbor's tree. We built the bar in two pieces, shipped the whole thing to Florida, and I met the truck at the beach house myself to install it. Without ever standing in the space before I designed it, it felt like kismet how well it fit, better than I let myself hope.

The underbar and back bar are mahogany, topped with quarter sawn white oak. An olive wood bartender station sits alongside it, with brass railing and accents tying the whole thing together.

The stools were simpler on paper. Straight grain quarter sawn white oak, and the only instruction from the client was that they had to swivel. Keeping that top of mind, I used dovetail joinery in the stretchers and traditional wooden joinery everywhere else. The seat and back cushions are three navy blue cowhides I'd had sitting in the shop for a while, waiting for the right project to need them. This was indeed the right project.

2. Chess Board & Chairs

I had never inlaid a piece this large into a table before, and then I went and gave it a sweeping frame on top of that, which is the kind of decision you make mid-build and hope holds up. It held up. This custom chess board is made of iroko and claro walnut. The iroko starts out golden and patinas into a warm chocolate brown over time, and it sits well against the walnut's grain.

Turning the first chess piece, I kept thinking about the terra cotta soldiers in China, how every single one is different from the next. So I gave each piece its own personality instead of making thirty-two identical soldiers. The bishops double as shot glasses, which nobody asked for and I regret nothing about.

The chairs took the strangest route of anything I built this year. Chess chairs made me think of the musical Chess, the one ABBA wrote the music for, which is really about the Cold War era it came out of. Brutalism was the architecture of that period, so I leaned into it, then softened the geometry until it landed somewhere closer to neo-brutalist. Traditional wooden joinery, dark red leather seat and back cushions, made by hand, as always.

A gorgeous piece in a home that was built with a lot of love, for people who clearly love the game.

3. Detailed Low Table

This one started with Naguri, a carving technique I power carved into solid iroko until the surface caught light the way I wanted it to. The stretcher is black wenge, the last piece of it I had in the shop, so I used up the wood and the idea at the same time. Gold and black sitting next to each other, held together with traditional joinery, the kind of detail you only notice once you're standing over it.

4. Dining Room Cabinet Set

Eight feet tall, eight feet wide. I'm 5'8", so I spent most of this build reaching above my own eye line. Solid red oak, inlaid glass doors, leather pulls on the doors and drawers. It's the hardest thing I've built to date, and I finished it sick, during a week that hit 110 degrees every day, which somehow turned into walking pneumonia.

Both pieces greet you the second you walk into that house. I think that's part of why I love them as much as I do, the difficulty is still in there somewhere when I look at them. That's the thing about hard work, it shows. You can see it in the piece before anyone tells you the story behind it.

5. Wood Vase, Cup & Bowl Collection

These are what I make while I'm waiting on glue to dry somewhere else. There's never a plan, just a block of wood on the lathe and seeing what's already in there. Burned cypress, red oak, walnut, black locust, the tallest piece is the burned cypress. It's the loosest work I do all year, and somehow still some of my favorite. No two ever come out the same, even when I'm trying to make a matching set.

The Difference Between Custom and Mass-Produced Furniture

None of these five pieces exist anywhere else. That's the beauty of starting with a specific piece of wood instead of a spec sheet. Mass production optimizes for sameness because sameness is cheap to repeat. Custom work does the opposite on purpose.

I'd love to hear which one you'd actually want in your own house, and why. And if any of these are sparking ideas for custom furniture of your own, let's connect and see what vision we can turn into reality for you.