About Grain & Grid

I'm Santiago. I design and build every piece in this shop myself, no team, no factory.

I graduated as an architect and worked as in the field for years, mostly in front of a screen. Eventually that stopped being enough. I wanted to make things with my hands, not just draw them for someone else to build. So I took the risk, stepped away from architecture, and started building furniture instead. First for my own apartment, then for Grain & Grid.

What means Grain & Grid

The Grid is what architecture gave me. Proportion, module, structure. Drawings before cuts. A dimension is a decision, not a guess, and a joint either resolves or it doesn't. Every piece I make starts on paper and in CAD, fully resolved, before a single board is touched. That discipline doesn't leave you after eight years, and I don't want it to.

The Grain is what the wood gave me, which was harder to learn. A board has an opinion. It has direction, figure, movement, and a way it wants to be used. Solid wood expands and contracts with the seasons of a Toronto apartment, and a design that ignores this will eventually tear itself apart. You can draw a leg perfectly and still be wrong about which part of which board it should come from.

The work happens in the negotiation between those two things. Architecture taught me to plan. Wood taught me to listen. A piece is finished when the geometry is exact and the material was respected — when neither one had to lose.

How I work

Everything I make is solid hardwood. No veneer over particleboard, no laminate pretending to be something it isn't. Ash, walnut, red oak, white oak, sourced from suppliers here in Ontario.