I am an independent furniture designer/maker located in mid-coast Maine. I work directly with customers to design and build thoughtful, elegant pieces that are made to be admired and used.

After a 16-year career working for Allegheny Technologies, a specialty steel company, I pursued training at the Center for Furniture Craftsmanship in Rockport Maine. Upon completion, I started Fedarko Furniture & Design and have been making furniture and teaching furniture making for the past 15 years.

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I find furniture making fulfilling because it requires a unique blend of artistic, analytical, and physical skills. The artistic part is the design process - generating ideas, then continually modifying and adapting them as the making process unfolds. The analytical part is solving the puzzle of how to shape the components, join them together in a lasting way, and do so as efficiently and economically as possible. The physical part is perhaps the most elemental: woodworking requires bodily action. In a world increasingly dominated by screens and sedentary activity – so much of it centered on the observation of others – woodworking refreshingly demands that we, ourselves, act. We must develop proficiency with hand and machine tools through hours of practice and repetition, then use those skills to shape and transform natural materials in an effort to bring a new object into the world.