My name is Matt Mehlenbacher. I build things out of wood.

I am a research scientist by training, PhD in Chemistry from Dartmouth, and I work full time at Duke. Woodworking started as a way to make things with my hands. At some point it became something more serious than that.

I am self-taught, which means I learned most things by doing them wrong first. The four attempts it took me to get the legs right on my first cabinet taught me more about mitered joinery than any book would have. I think that is a reasonable way to learn.

I work out of a professional 16 x 24 shop on our property in Chatham County, at the Chapel Hill border. The shop sits on 3.5 acres that was entirely forested when we moved in June 2022. Since then we have cleared the land, built the shop, and turned the property into a working homestead: orchard, vineyard, garden, animals, the whole thing, alongside full-time careers and two young kids. There are currently about 160 hardwood logs stacked and waiting for the sawmill. Some of them will eventually become furniture.

The homestead matters to how I think about the shop. My wife's family in Moldova has grown grapes for wine for generations. That background, the idea that you grow things deliberately, that you build things to last, that you know where your materials come from, runs through everything we do here. The woodworking is part of the same instinct.

The things I build tend to be architectural: custom built-ins, stairs, flooring, ceiling details, and furniture designed for a specific room. I did the stairs, the flooring, and the ceiling in our house, all in cherry from rough-sawn stock. That is what I mean when I say architectural woodworking.

I take on a small number of projects at a time. The work in this portfolio is a fair sample of what I build.