About the Maker
About the Maker
My shop is a sanctuary — an old barn on first blush, housing the treasures and shipwrecks of three decades spent chasing one stubborn question: how was this made?
As a boy I would run my finger along the ripple molding of my childhood dresser, tracing each wave, wondering what hands or machine could have shaped something so alive. The surface caught light the way water does — shifting, never quite the same from one angle to the next. I didn't know it then, but that question would keep me busy the rest of my life.
Years later I came to understand that ripple molding was no longer being produced, and hadn't been for a very long time. The methods used to create it were largely forgotten — a craft that once ornamented the finest Dutch Golden Age frames and English furniture of the Cromwell era had simply... stopped. The waving engines that shaped these moldings, first documented by Joseph Moxon in 1678, had become museum pieces and footnotes.
Then an issue of Fine Woodworking arrived in my mailbox. Inside was an article about a maker who was producing short pieces of ripple molding to reproduce certain clocks by J.C. Brown. I fell in love with those clocks — and even more so with the revelation that these moldings were not extinct. Something turned over in me. If one person could do it, the knowledge wasn't truly lost. It was just waiting.
I began building my own waving engine, working from what I could decipher from that single article and the scant sources available to me. This was before the internet could hand you answers. Every detail had to be earned — through reading, failed experiments, and long hours of thinking with my hands. The complexity of the process fed my curiosity rather than discouraged it. Each problem solved revealed more worth solving.
Today I produce ripple moldings in the Dutch Golden Age tradition from my shop in New York, handcrafting picture frames one at a time. The undulations are knife-scraped — each ripple shaped by a blade riding a pattern, cutting the wave into the wood in careful, repeated passes. The finished moldings catch and scatter light in ways that flat surfaces simply cannot, giving the frames a warmth and movement that has drawn the eye for nearly four centuries.
Every frame I make carries a name rooted in that tradition — Maryse, Bram, Mina, Francisca, Hendrik, Karel, Gustaaf — each a distinct profile with its own character. Some are bold and architectural; others are quiet and refined. All of them begin as raw wood and become something with a pulse.
This is a one-person operation. I design the profiles, scrape the moldings, join the frames, photograph them, and ship them from the barn. There is no factory, no production line — just a maker and the work.
As a devoted reader of Lost Art Press, I'll point you to their piece on the waving engine — a wonderful look at these early machines and the ingenuity behind them.
— Tom