From London to Canada to Alaska

 

 

We took our family on an extraordinary journey travelling to the wilderness of Canada and Alaska to reconnect with nature and to live a simpler more sustainable life.

It changed our lives forever. The outstanding beauty of the environment encouraged us to pursue our love of handmade crafting using sustainable materials.

 

Six years ago, I left my career as a broker in London, to seek out a better work, life balance.

 

We sold our six bedroom house and cars and moved to a small coastal island in Essex where we bought and ran a restaurant for two years.

My wife and I love cooking but soon discovered that cooking for friends and family was nothing like catering for the hungry masses of seaside revellers, so we sold our restaurant and began to revisit our life long dream.

 

We wanted to live in the wilderness with nothing but the Eagles and the bears for company (although to be honest the thought of bears terrified me!)

 

So after many months of dreaming and planning, we decided to pack up our four children, our massive dog Archie and the mother in law and got on a plane to Canada .

 

We ended up on an island off Vancouver Island called Denman ( one of the gulf stream islands ) where we stayed in a cabin over winter chopping wood for fire, catching salmon and trout from the sea and the Lakes, tubing on snowy mountains for a Christmas Eve trip, traversing forests to select our own Christmas tree and decorating it from all homemade decorations. We built a smoker for our off grid neighbour Cheryl and helped plaster her magnificent cob house, we milled wood and built a composting station .

 

The opportunities and adventures were endless, but visa's dictated our story,  so we purchased a 30ft RV and within two days we were on our way to Homer in Alaska where we had arranged to stay with the Kilcher family,  a family of homesteaders who have a show the Discovery Channel called "Alaska - The last frontier".

 

The journey up through British Columbia and the Yukon was the most incredible experience, we would go days without seeing any other humans. Although it was March, winter was still very much present in the northern territories of Canada, and entering Alaska was an almost spiritual experience. Alaska was full of life, fun, campfires, smores, potlucks (a gathering where everyone brings food ) , cattle drives, snow on Easter Sunday, glaciers, halibut fishing, more salmon and ATV's .

 

We were asked to stay on at the Kilcher homestead, but once again visa's dictated our length of stay, so we left Alaska and headed back down to Denman island where we had started our journey and sadly started to make plans for our departure back to the UK.

 

We previously looked at the Chippendale School of Furniture a few years back and decided to take the plunge and book onto the 2019 Professional Course starting in October. 

We returned from Canada in September, said hello to friends and family and headed up to East Lothian in Scotland. Our vision is to make beautiful one of a kind pieces of furniture inspired by nature that will last through generations.