I design and build solid-wood pieces by hand — cutting boards, furniture, mountain-themed décor and hard wood with poured epoxy accents.
JM Mountain Studio is my woodworking shop in Trinidad, Colorado. I turned my basement into a fully functioning wood shop as a step towards my ultimate dream to make high-end custom furniture.
I take a rough, ugly board that most people would walk right past, and I bring out what’s underneath. The grain tells a story if you know how to read it — the good years, the droughts, the fires, the bugs that the tree lived through — and my job is to read it and bring out the beauty from scars.
Cutting boards, mountain décor, epoxy and hard wood pieces — every one of a kind. The full collection lives in the gallery.
View the GalleryI’ve been making things with my hands since I was eleven. I still remember the first piece I ever built and the feeling that came with it: I made that. Not bought it — made it. As a kid I walled off part of our garage just to have a place to create. Making things feels like playtime to me.
I turned that into a living and ran my own remodeling business for seven years. I loved that no two days were ever the same. Later I worked in sales, where I learned how to listen for what a customer actually wants and guide them to it. That turns out to be exactly what custom furniture takes.
Two things knocked me off that path. My construction tools were stolen and I was absolutely crushed. Then a shoulder injury took me out of contracting for good. For a long time, I just resigned myself to office work. Eventually, I stopped trying to fit a round dowel into a flat biscuit hole and admitted to myself what I’d known all along — at heart, I am a maker.
I turned the injury into opportunity and JM Mountain Studio was born. Right now, it runs out of a tiny 200-square-foot basement in a mountain cabin. I work with the space — every machine is on wheels, secondhand tools I’ve slowly collected — and it works, but it fights me. It’s definitely taught me lessons in patience.
I’ve spent a lifetime building things people keep and know how to make the best of any situation. This isn’t a hobby dressed up as a business — it’s the work I was meant to do, and I’m finally in a place to do it right.
It’s work, but it’s not work — it’s fun work. I’m doing my job, but I call it going down to play.
— JJ
Handmade competes with cheap, mass-produced goods, so I have to earn a price that reflects real craftsmanship. To differentiate myself, I’m leaning into a mountain theme with local and reclaimed materials.
I like clean, straight lines. It’s the grain that makes or breaks the piece. I never leave a corner sharp — nine times out of ten I’ll put a slight chamfer on it. There’s so much thought that goes into a piece that people take for granted.
I learned how to listen for what a customer actually wants and guide them to it.
As the shop grows, I’ll move toward custom furniture — high-end, made-to-order work that’s a true collaboration with the customer. We go back and forth until their vision and mine become the same thing, and then I make it real.