I was born Brandon Muñoz, but my friends named me Monk at 13. They said I looked like a flying monkey whenever I launched off the sketchy ramps we built for our bikes and skateboards. Well, the name stuck, and so did the building.

I studied fine art at Otis College of Art and Design in Los Angeles, then went to work at Jim Henson's Creature Shop in Burbank — the studio behind some of film's most technically demanding characters. Building creatures that had to perform, not just exist, taught me early that craft is never the point in itself. It's what makes the vision survive.

Between 2003 and 2010 I served as a preacher, planting a church with my wife Pamela on the streets of Camden Town, London. Camden holds centuries in plain view — Victorian market halls, punks, drugs, tourists, and a canal running since 1816.

Working among people from every walk of life, in a place where history was built into the walls, gave me a particular clarity: that what you make for someone can outlast the moment it was made. That it can become part of their story.

I came back to the studio and haven't left. I work alongside my apprentices — men and women I've trained in my techniques and philosophy over the years, including my two sons, now grown and carrying the craft into their own creative fields. Pamela homeschools our four children down the street. I do this work for the glory of God and to express the beauty of creation. That is the honest answer to why.

Monkwood Studios has been in the same building in downtown Fullerton since 2013 — a vintage industrial space that holds the memory of what it was and the energy of what it is. The tool wall is a twenty-foot great white shark built from reclaimed wood, every hand tool hung in its jaw. The workbenches are worn in. The floor is honest. It looks like a place where things get made because it is.

The studio sits in a community of builders and makers — an auto restoration shop next door, a furniture designer across the way, a welder who has been in the building since the early 2000s. The Magoski Arts Colony that once anchored this block ran its artwalk here from 2008 to 2018. Its spirit has not left. Monkwood carries it forward.

Monk's grandfather built things with more bolts than necessary and wood heavier than required — not out of excess, but out of love. That instinct runs through everything made here. Overbuilt. Considered. Made to outlast the people who made it.

The people we build for are multi-disciplined makers. Grammy winners. Oscar-winning composers. Tony recipients. Actors. Filmmakers. Performers whose work will be here long after the trends around it have moved on. They come to Monkwood because they understand — the way makers always do — that the environment shapes the work. The desk you sit at every day is part of the process. // Tori Kelly photos by Ari Michelson

Our work is mostly made to order, apart from the singular art pieces.

Designed by Monk. Built in Fullerton by our collective of apprentices. We shipped everywhere.