Overview
While he was growing up, Ben’s parents sawed lumber together at their custom sawmill Block Brothers Lumber in Monroe, Maine, where they cleared land and designed and built their home from the ground up. Sawing lumber offered them a way to work with their hands, to be self-sufficient, and to provide a useful, tangible service to people in their community. Ben had to leave Maine—and return home—to discover that this was what he wanted, too.
Ben studied ethnomusicology and education history and policy at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island. After graduating he moved to a small town outside of Durham, North Carolina, where he worked briefly on a horse farm and in an elementary school before finding work in a cabinet shop. Woodworking was a natural fit for a guy who had grown up with sawdust in his pockets. A stint at a small guitar shop helped him further hone his skills and deepened his appreciation for detail and quality. He eventually moved home to Maine, started building cabinets and doing finish work for a builder in his hometown. In 2013, Ben founded his business, now housed in what was once a boatyard on Route One in Northport.
These days Ben lives with his wife Morgan and their son Andrew on old farmland in a small town close to where he grew up. Drawing on his deep familiarity with the materials and his love of the craft, Ben is exacting, and committed to making timeless custom cabinetry of the highest quality.