I grew up curious about systems — how things move, what they're made of, where the pattern lives underneath the surface. That curiosity took me down rivers most people have never heard of. It put me on skis on terrain that required reading the mountain before committing to a line. It's the same instinct every time: slow down, look harder, find the logic the material already has.

Wood does this better than anything I've encountered. Every slab is a record — of drought years and wet years, of how the tree leaned toward light, of what stressed it, what let it breathe. The grain holds all of it. A burl that looks like an aerial photograph of a river delta. A crack that runs exactly where a resin channel wants to be. A figure in the maple that only reveals itself after the third pass with the plane, in the right angle of light.

I don't design pieces. I read them. The slab tells me where the edge belongs, where the void wants filling, where the legs should stand to let the surface speak. That's the theory — not imposed, uncovered.

The Slab Theory name isn't about slabs of wood, exactly. It's about the idea that the beauty is already in there. Your job is to find it.

I source from a network of Wisconsin wood dealers who are, honestly, obsessives — people who've been storing extraordinary slabs for years, waiting for someone who'll do right by them. The weird ones. The ones with too much figure, too many voids, shapes that break every standard template. Those are the ones I want. They're the ones with the most to say.

When I'm not in the shop, I'm usually on water. I've paddled whitewater rivers that required more problem-solving than anything else I've done, and I've skied lines where the whole point was to stop fighting the terrain and start following it. That's what this is. You don't conquer a slab. You figure out what it already knows, and you get out of the way.