About

I'm Jake Lunniss. I make furniture by hand in a small workshop in Ocean Grove, on the Bellarine Peninsula. I live there with my wife and three children. I grow vegetables. I bake bread. I write about all of it here.

For a decade I built invisible things: business automation, digital workflows, software whose whole purpose was to eliminate human interaction. I was good at it. I was also a hundred and twenty-eight 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.

The work now is furniture. Hand-cut joinery in Australian hardwoods, built for people who commission it directly. The pieces that interest me most come from the Chinese tradition: the Ming and early Qing forms, the locking joinery, the frame-and-panel construction that lets a table survive four hundred years of seasonal movement without glue. I'm not reproducing Ming furniture. I'm studying it, and working out what the tradition has to teach an Australian maker building in Red Gum, Silver Ash, and Huon Pine. I write about that study as it happens, at the bench.

Alongside the workshop there's a kitchen garden that feeds the kitchen, a kitchen that feeds the table, and a table that's been the point of the whole enterprise from the start. The tools are modernist — sous vide, dehydrator, chamber vacuum — sitting alongside the cast iron and the wooden spoons.

I sell furniture direct, to people I've built a relationship with. No Instagram. No gallery representation. No middlemen. If you want to commission a piece, the way to start is to read the work, subscribe to the writing, and write back when something catches.

Principles

This site runs on an old HP computer 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. Letters arrive on Fridays. Essays when they're ready. Bench Marks when the timber teaches me something worth passing on.