About

About Tech -n- Wood

Great wine deserves something worthy to hold it.

You did not pick that bottle by accident. Someone spent a season on the fruit and a few years on the patience, and you went looking until you found it. Then it goes flat on a shelf in the dark, next to everything else. A bottle worth pouring is worth putting on display.

That is the entire idea behind what I make.

The work

These are display pieces for wine. Bottles held up in an open twin helix. Glasses suspended in air. The whole thing balanced on a curve of white oak that looks like it should not be able to hold anything at all, and does.

The Aetheron holds glasses, in a two-glass and a four-glass size. The Apeiron is a three-bottle twin-spiral piece, made in small batches.  Each one is meant to be looked at as much as used, on a bar, a kitchen island, a console table, or the front counter of a tasting room.

How it is made

Every piece begins as specially processed white oak, lumber prepared so that it will take an extreme bend, and is shaped by hand into a single continuous spiral. That is the hard part, and it is where most of my time goes. 

Each finished piece gets Rubio Monocoat Oil Plus 2C with SheenPlus, a hardwax oil that settles into the grain rather than sitting on top of it, so the oak still reads and feels like oak. Everything is made in small batches, one piece at a time, by hand. Single edition pieces may be finished in other ways to match the intent of the design.

Who is behind it

My name is Marty Johll. I spent thirty years in technology, most of it as an IT director at the University of Wisconsin Division of Extension, before the studio became the main thing.

That interest never went away, it just moved benches. Computer-aided design lets me work out a piece and refine its proportions long before I commit good oak to it. CNC handles the work that has to be exact and repeatable. AI has become a genuinely useful shop partner, from thinking through a design problem to sorting out the business side of a one-person operation. The hands still do the part that matters, but the technology means less guessing and less wasted wood.

The shop is located in the Driftless Area of Southwestern Wisconsin. One of my pieces received an honorable mention in Rubio Monocoat USA’s "Made in America: Celebrating the Trades."