I'm Jake Lunniss. I build furniture by commission, grow food in a kitchen garden, and cook with the kind of tools most people associate with a commercial kitchen. I live in Ocean Grove with my wife and three children.
For a decade I built invisible things — business automation, digital workflows, software that existed to eliminate human interaction. I was good at it. I was also 128 kilograms and couldn't name a single thing I'd made that I could hold in my hands. The full account of how that ended is in the Manifesto.
This site is the record of what came after.
What you'll find here
The Workshop
Shop notes on furniture built for commission customers. Jigs, joinery, and the technical decisions behind objects designed to outlast their makers. This is the trade, and the heart of the work.
The Kitchen
Recipes in standardised, modernist format — high-protein, low-sugar, built around food science and industrial tools. Jerky, biltong, spiced stews, and the occasional act of outright gluttony when the occasion demands it.
The Garden
Observations on soil, seed, and kitchen-gardening as a hedge against the ephemeral. The garden feeds the kitchen. The kitchen feeds the table. The table is the point.
The Gear
Field notes on tools that earn their place — the Magimix 4200XL, the Benchfoods Dehydrator, the hand planes, the power tools. I believe in buying once and crying once, and I'll tell you when something is worth the tears.
The Manifesto
A series of essays on what I call the Heavy Life — using the precision of modern tools to sustain a life built on faith, analogue ritual, and the refusal to be weightless.
Principles
This site runs on an old HP computer repurposed as a server in our mud-room. There are no tracking pixels, no ads, and no cloud dependencies where they can be avoided.
The goal is offline authority: the ability to cook, build, grow, and record knowledge regardless of whether the Machine is plugged in.
If you want to follow the work, subscribe to the dispatches. They arrive when there's something worth saying.