About Trey Jones:

Trey Jones found his way to furniture by way of fine arts. An early art magnet program in his home town of Lexington, Kentucky led Trey to study painting at the Savannah College of Art and Design in Savannah Georgia. While there Trey discovered furniture design and never looked back, he was drawn to the ability to apply his creative expression to functional objects. Trey graduated from SCAD with a BFA in the Furniture Design program.

In 2007 Trey began his journey into design and woodworking in Seattle Washington. There he was surrounded by a thriving maker and design community, modern architecture, access to beautiful raw lumber, and a laid back West Coast attitude. A desire to be closer to family landed Trey back on the East Coast in Washington DC in 2015. There he reestablished his studio and introduced an atelier collection of furniture on his website. The growth of the studio has allowed a greater focus on craft, studio furniture and one of a kind pieces.

After graduating from Savannah College of Art and Design I moved to Seattle, Washington and apprenticed with a local furniture maker before starting my own practice, which I initially supplemented with jobs for established furniture brands. This very traditional context helped me build my skills and ignited my creativity but, in a way, also had the effect of restraining my creativity. After almost 10 years of practice, I took the important and decisive step of turning towards sculptural furniture, and the unique expression of my own creative vision. I felt a need to produce something relevant to me personally, something that reflects the time I live in. I started to look at my work from a future historical perspective; how will people see it in 200 years? For this question to be germane, my answer had to start with quality construction, not only so that it could last that long, but so the quality and craftsmanship would be visible so people would want it to last that long. Quality of construction demanded originality of form – this high bar motivated me to begin making the best work I knew I could make. Physical, interactive function is still essential to my work through typologies like tables and cabinets, but with the goal of creating richer than typical experience for users by adding interactive elements that are not strictly necessary. I have also committed to working with a unique, environmentally friendly, and deeply patterned material that is the result of the harmonious combination of compositions I create, interacting with recycled plywood’s inherent striations.

A significant motivation for my work is my earnest desire to reduce waste in both my personal and professional life. While contemplating my practice, I jokingly imagined that the definition of hell was being forced to live the same life over again but with only everything you cast away in your past life. I saw a lot of scrap plywood in my personal hell - and felt empowered to change that. This approach played to my strengths in skill and technique, which helped me to find a way to embrace the irregularities and intrinsic materiality of plywood by developing a modified stack lamination technique I call ‘wood nerikomi’, after the Japanese porcelain technique. This development coincided with my aesthetic awakening to color and expressive forms, rejecting the commercial modernist and industrial, standardized furniture that I was steeped in, not only through my own work but also my wife’s work for the brand B&B Italia. Today I revel in combining the regularity of pattern and irregularity of sculpted forms. I am also driven by a need for discovery, and a desire to elevate salvaged refuse wood by creating pieces that are challenging, compelling, and expertly crafted.