About Us

BRIEF BIO

I have long had an interest in architecture, but my introduction to the Arts & Crafts style came about somewhat obliquely. In 1980, while living in Vancouver, I shared in the purchase of a Craftsman style bungalow built in 1926. Some years later I began a carpentry apprenticeship and started working in the trade. At the same time I also began to look with much more interest at my own home. The building needed care, and I began to provide it as best I could. Along the way I learned much about that old house, and the era in which it had been built.

I now live on Vancouver Island and once again, fortunately, in another old bungalow. My interest in the Arts & Crafts style has gone beyond building architecture to include furnishings, ceramics, textiles and lighting. I am particularly interested in the rich textile designs of William Morris, the architecture and furniture designs of Gustav Stickley and the brothers Charles and Henry Greene, the Prairie style of Frank Lloyd Wright and the Art Nouveau motifs of Charles Rennie Mackintosh. Simplicity, functionality, and structural honesty are ideas advocated by each of these men. A good many Stickley and Greene brothers pieces demonstrate very well, for instance, the Arts & Crafts aesthetic of functional design allied to joinery as art. I very much share these ideas and, in my own work, take great pleasure striving always to better understand and achieve them.

It is imperative that we surround ourselves with honest, uplifting, simple and beautiful expressions of ideas to be conveyed to the brain through the eye by means of form and colour.

-Gustav Stickley