I grew up in my dad's workshop, though "workshop" is a generous term. He's a carpenter, and he mostly worked out of our house and the back of his pickup on job sites. We didn't have much, but I had his tools from the time I could hold them, and I always wanted to build something. That pull never left. I studied architecture with a focus on sustainability, took up furniture design alongside it, then spent years in a finance career that used none of it. Eventually I burned out and went looking for the tools I'd set down.

I joined a community wood shop in Philadelphia and, for the better part of a decade, made everything I could, we started our own family and the work found its subject. When our kids were born, I thought hard about which pieces I wanted to be part of the family: a rocking chair, the dining table I built the first year it was our turn to host Thanksgiving, and the dressers and changing tables that got us through the early years. Those aren't just furniture pieces in the background. They are functional little units that make daily life easier. And one day, they'll be handed down to the very kiddos they helped raise, equipped with all the character marks and stories my kids added to them. That's the whole point of this for me.

GVH Woodworks is my initials and that same idea. My sustainability background stayed with me. I seek out storm-felled and reclaimed wood, and the "problem" boards most makers reject, the ones with a knot or a check. Rather than cut those flaws out, I stabilize them with steel or brass set across the grain and let them become the piece's character. Nothing worth saving gets wasted. Every piece is named for someone in my family, because that's what these are built to become — part of one, and present for a long time. For me, all of it is a proud extension of where I started.