It started with a question from a group of like-minded innovators imagining their next workspace. When it came to me, I didn’t have to think long: “I want an office with no walls.” It wasn’t about square footage. It was about a life without drywall standing between my hands and the grain.
Wood and stone have been my language longer than I’ve had words for why. For most of my career, that language showed up as graphic and visual design – well-known firms, a national and international reputation, eventually my own design studio in New York City. It was a career built on color, proportion, and composition. Looking back, it was training: it taught me to see structure inside raw material long before I picked up power tools.
Since declaring that desire, wood has found its way to me in abundance – ethically harvested, or gifted by others clearing out workshops and weathered boards. I don’t think of myself as the source of what I make. I’m a vessel. A tree spends decades pulling light and rain into itself; my work gives it a second life – a table, a bench, a piece a grandchild will run their hands across and ask, “Where did this come from?”
That handoff doesn’t end with the finished piece. Sawdust becomes amendment for garden beds or mulch for new tree growth. Cutoffs get glued into new builds instead of discarded. I’ve even started collecting other makers’ scraps and working them into my own pieces – a quiet, esoteric collaboration, carrying their energy forward without them ever knowing. Nothing is wasted, because every part still holds possibility.
This is the work I’m building now, out of an office with no walls – offered to anyone who can look at reclaimed or naturally sourced elements and see what I see: not raw material, but a life still being lived, just in a different form.
You can see where it all started on Instagram – @thestandingredbear