Hello I’m John,
I was born in Mexico, I grew up in Mexico City and lived there until I was 20.
I attended Rollins College in Winter Park FL. where I got a Bachelors degree in Computer Science.
Once I graduated Rollins I started working at Makr which is a small design company based in Winter Park FL.
I was brought in since I had a background in designing and building furniture. The company was going to focus on using technology to create unique pieces of furniture, as well as home accent pieces that required complicated methods of manufacturing. My previous experience programing robots was a perfect fit for this.
Through the six years I worked at Makr. I worked as part of the team that was in charge of the products that came out of the shop. We had very high standards of quality and consistency.
I worked with the owner and different clients to create unique pieces of furniture. Almost always, there was a design created by the owner and I would have to engineer or modify it, creating a fully production friendly design.
After six years, multiple products and commercial projects, I branched out and have started my own studio creating products and pieces of unique furniture, always focusing on providing very good quality products.
This website is an exposé of the projects that I was involved in, in one aspect or another.
There are several products that have not made it to this site, sorry. The last page shows some of these works.
Thank you for stopping by.
Please leave a comment if you'd like in the comment page.
New General is the local coffee house/essentials store of down town winter park.
For New General, the owners idea was a to build a local coffee house where people could enjoy some food and coffee in a cool environment, while also being able to find great products.
Part of the designer’s wishes were a continuous shelving unit with storage underneath. The unit was meant to run along a wall, turning a corner and seem like it was one piece. This presented multiple challenges. Everything had to fit exactly to the space, it also had to be built in place given the size of the finished product. He wanted everything to look uniform and as simple as possible.
There were several pieces in this space that required to be built offsite and put together in the space. There was a great amount of pre planning done to make sure all details were considered and installation went as planned.
During this project I was tasked with handling the engineering of the pieces based of of the designers models. As well as sourcing materials, organizing production of components and guiding the team through the process of the build as well as installation.
Lineage coffee was the last project done at the Makr shop, before the doors were closed.
There were three main pieces for this project that I was tasked with building, two tables and a bench. The tables were the main bulk of the work, made entirely by hand, based on drawings from the designer.
The tables were probably the two pieces I enjoyed working on the most. It was with those two pieces that I realized I was ready to move on and start a new chapter in life.
For The Guesthouse, the owner and designer wanted to create a space where the main focal point of the bar was at the center rather than on a wall or one side of the space. In this way people would gather and face others rather than being scattered through out the space.
The central piece of the bar was the main focus of the project. The owners and designer wanted the central bar piece to have an industrial look that felt monolithic. The designer took elements from similar existing places and created a custom piece with a metal frame with an internal wooden shelving unit.
I was part of the team tasked to create and install the center piece of bar as well as seating and custom benches that we salvaged from the owners’ previous bar to maintain a piece of history in Orlando.
Black Deli is a casual fast food cuban café with a couple locations in Orlando.
Their flagship location had been in Winter Park for over 10 years and once they decided to grow, we were invited to help out with the build out.
I was part of the team responsible for creating the interior furnishings, including eating and seating pieces.
This was a very hands on build out since it was our first large project and we were going along this new journey along side with the Black Bean crew.
This was a developing project that lasted about three years in total. As the staff grew and their needs changed, we helped adapting the space to fit their needs accordingly.
In retrospect, this was the most involved project that we ever did.
Lucia Benjamin is a salon located in downtown Winter Park FL.
This project consisted mostly of a louvered wall that turned a corner creating a privacy wall which would allow light to pass through, so the space would not be too dark on the inside.
For this project, my focus was mostly on figuring out how we would build and install the louvered wall. I had to create the designers idea, making a model that we could create and put together at the space with no room for error.
This project consisted mostly of remodeling the existing space to make it feel more like the newer Mills 50 location that we had recently worked on.
The Designer wanted to make things flow uniformly, and look as if they were one piece. There were only two main features in this project. The ordering counter and the eating bar.
Outside of the Orlando/Winter Park projects, there are some companies I have been lucky to be a part of some of their projects. Here are some examples with terrible pictures taken on my phone.
Basalt Nappa:
For Basalt, we were asked to make the light fixture for the bar area, the hostess stand, and the hardware for the doors. I was given a drawing and metal parts for the lamp and had to figure out how it would be built, taken apart, shipped to location and assembled by the crew that was building the space. Here is a link to Rapt studio’s explanation of the job.
https://raptstudio.com/work/basalt/
Google Headquarters:
I was asked to work on some tables that would go in some waiting area of the google offices. They consisted of multiple rings that were stacked.
J. dawgs:
This project was mainly custom stools, fabricated with their logo.
https://raptstudio.com/work/j-dawgs/
Riffle Paper Co:
This was my first project that I worked on at Makr. We worked on their first trade show booth. They outgrew it quite fast, but it was a very interesting project to be able to work on.
Here’s a link to the only good picture I could find (thank you Anna):
https://www.instagram.com/p/l3SCK/
Cask & Larder now Ravenous pig:
Helped build the large party dinning tables. Also worked on the drink tables at the bar, seating, and brewers table. Oh, and helped hanging an alligator on the wall…
Work-Bench New York:
Built custom benches and custom desks, for their private work rooms.
Unis New York:
Helped build the interiors. This project was interesting since we had to build it completely in our shop, ship it to New York and hope that it would all go together according to plan.
I have done work in the prototyping products mostly for Makr. I have recently started working in products for other companies.
Working from the models made by the Designer, modifying them, making a first prototype. While that was done, a process was also created so that they could be consistently produced.
These are some examples of the ones that were released.
I have mostly worked on creating a real version of a computer model. I have been working with a CNC machine most of the time to make these models come to life. Most of the work I did was trying to make things look as simple as possible while requiring very intricate processes to make them work.
