About

Hi, I'm Mark

Mark in his garage workshop, standing at the workbench he built, tools on a pegboard behind him — **Where it happens.** This is the bench I built when I started again. There's now everything I need for my workshop: a lathe, a laser engraver, table and mitre saws, a bandsaw, drill press, thicknesser/jointer and sanding station. There's also a wall of hand tools in here now, with a soft spot for the old Stanley planes and spokeshaves.

I've been making things by hand since I was fifteen, when I started out in the silver trade, raising goblets, dishes and tankards from flat sheet metal. Life took me in other directions for a long stretch, but the pull to make never really left. During the Covid lockdowns I cleared out the garage, built myself a workbench, and started again, this time working in wood and light.

What's stayed with me the whole way is the quiet satisfaction of watching a base material become something someone values, as true of turning a bowl from native timber today as it was of raising a tankard at fifteen.

The part I love most is when the piece belongs to someone else's story. Give me the bare bones, an idea, or just a material that matters, and I'll tell your story through the work. It might be a slab of timber your grandad kept in the garage for years. That, to me, is what this is really about: connecting with someone, and transforming their story into something they can hold, a physical memory. Whether it's turned from native timber or laser-engraved, it's created with you, not just for you.

Whāia te iti kahurangi, ki te tuohu koe, me he maunga teitei

Pursue excellence; should you stumble, let it be to a lofty mountain.

A whakataukī I try to work by.

One of two old lawn bowls, turned into an apple and a bud vase — **Made with you, from what matters.** These started as a pair of old lawn bowls (this is one of them, still wearing its KKM monogram and hand-tooled rings). One became the apple, the other the bud vase. Bring me something with a history, and I'll give it a second life.

A turned lignum-vitae apple shown closed, then opened into a small bowl — **And it opens.** The bowls were lignum vitae, one of the densest timbers there is. One of them became this apple, and it isn't solid: lift the top and it's a little bowl. The kind of detail you only find by holding it.

A slender turned lignum-vitae bud vase with a small carved wooden rose standing in it — **The other bowl.** Its partner became this slender bud vase, turned from the same dense lignum vitae, with a little carved rose to stand in it. Small, and all the more work for it.

Let's start

Let's make yours

If you've got a piece in mind, or just the beginnings of one, I'd love to hear it.

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