Second Life Studios

You can read the previous part here.

It took years of contracting and 10 months in Colorado to make Sam Lutz realize he wanted to do woodworking full time.

Our Project Manager started working with wood much like our other craftsmen: in shop class. Scott Kreshel at the Blue Valley CAPS program took Sam under his wing.

"He pushed me to try different things, and that was cool." Sam drew on his knowledge of general contracting he had learned from years of flipping houses with his father. After two years of college, Sam moved to Loveland, CO to work for a high-end custom cabinet maker. That was when it clicked.

"I really cut my teeth there. After high school, I had an engineering internship at Black and Veatch. I have a mechanical mind and I really like creating stuff with my hands. That internship just wasn't for me."

After moving back to KC for his now-wife, Sam started working at Second Life Studios.

"I don't think of myself as creative, but I'm just not abstract creative. But with woodworking, it allows me to be creative in different ways. I dig the problem-solving aspect of it."

"My favorite project has been Odradeks. I got to do stuff I've never done before. [The waterfall countertop] took five tries before we finally got it, but it was extremely satisfying to see it finished."

“Well, my favorite was either that or the walnut desk I built for my wife.”

"I mostly follow the work of hand-tool woodworkers these days. Guys like Roy Schack in Australia and Todd Nebel are great."

"Woodworking is a dying craft. There's a lot of dudes doing the artisan and Pinteresty stuff and woodworking is hip and cool again, but the craft of multi-generational furniture making is dying. I'm an old soul. I like old stuff. I like the stuff that takes time."

See the previous part here.

Mitch Trumpp, our Fabrication Director, has built hundreds of items. Tables, chairs, doors, bars, cabinets, and more. And it all started with an iguana cage.

Growing up in a house of woodworkers, Mitch built everything from that cage to duck blinds and a catfish trap in shop classes. “I was a goofball though. I didn’t learn much long term.”

Mitch started woodworking with his grandfather, a professional. “I went out to his farm outside Manhattan [Kansas] once or twice a week and built with him. He used to sit in the chair and make sure I didn’t cut my hand off.”

“It was the first time I saw a difference between hobby and a business. For the rest of my life, that time will be one of the highlights.”

Mitch got inspired by classics like Norm Abram and his first “mentor,” Brian Holland. “He really showed me what quality is.”

After college, Mitch traveled to Indonesia on a business internship. “I learned that instead of just seeking to make profits, business could be about loving and serving the local people.”

“My plan was to come back [to America], get married, go back overseas, and start a business. But a mentor said, ‘Why not start one here?’ The only thing I could think of was woodworking.”

So Mitch started Adventure Indoors Woodworking.

“Everything was rustic. It was all barnwood and logs. But, it was a tough market because I made everything by hand. My first customer outside my family wanted a glass top coffee table, and when he picked it up he said ‘Man, that’s badass.’”

Mitch was then connected with Ryan Henrich, a founder of Second Life Studios that has since left to found several other businesses in Kansas City.

“Someone connected us and we met up at a coffee shop in Kansas City, so he was Ryan Latte in my phone. He still is to this day.”

Ryan and Mitch later hooked up with Chris Gorney, Second Life’s Creative Director, and they got the Sony Music job. Mitch calls this the Mount Everest moment for Second Life Studios.

Mitch loves working with wood and building stuff “because I still feel very confident in the potential to influence lives through woodworking and through business. We’ve only scratched the surface.”

“If we do it right, there’s a chance that 100, 200 years from now, we could still be a company to influence the people and the city. I get stoked about helping create spaces that foster relationship and memorable experiences.”

“Especially at PT’s Coffee. People have accepted jobs at those tables. People have gotten engaged at those tables.”

Last week, we got the chance to work on a house with local group Nehemiah Properties. They renovate rental properties for families around the metro who wouldn’t otherwise be able to afford the work. We got to work on cabinets, floors, doors, and even windows. Soon, a family of eight will move in to a fully renovated second floor apartment.

We love our city. We want to utilize our skills, talents, and resources to make a positive impact here in KC, and that’s not always through building tables and designing tiny houses (even though that stuff is still part of it).

We believe that businesses have a responsibility to make their city a better place and we believe that every human being should have a place they can call home.

We think it would be fantastic for every business to be about more than simply product and profits. While still very important, product and profit are not the end but the means to the end. We still try extremely hard to make amazing and lasting products and to make a profit off of those products, but that’s just part of it.

Through product and profits, companies can leverage themselves to meet needs in our city. Imagine what Kansas City would look like if businesses stepped up to the needs they saw.

See the previous part here.

High school might have sucked for most people, but for Derek Combs, our shop foreman, it's where he found his calling.  

"I took a shop class my freshman year. It was taught by John Slinkard who was a bank of knowledge on life and woodworking." Derek took as many shop classes as he could and even became the teacher's aide.

"I went to college for photography and minored in industrial design, but I realized I didn't want to do photography for a living. Building seemed like a natural progression. I've always wanted to customized everything I have for myself anyway. I love to tinker."

After building bookshelves and tables in a friend's garage for awhile ("We just built whatever we thought was cool."), Derek started work in the finishing department of a local manufacturer. After a few years of that, he began working here at Second Life Studios. “I loved working on República especially. There is so much cool stuff on the bar and back bar. It was a great build.”

"I've always liked making stuff. When I making things, I like to trace the process back as far as possible. I want to get as close as I can to Step One."

Derek follows the work of Jory Brigham and Sam Maloof for inspiration. "Sam Maloof is a giant bank of spiritual and woodworking knowledge. I think he said 'The things I make are for other people, but the way I make them is for myself.' I like that. I think building stuff is enjoyable, but I'm not curing cancer or anything like that."

Working at Second Life Studios has been a bit of a surprise. "At first, I hated the reclaimed pine and other barnwood, but after working and becoming more familiar with it, it comes out unique and awesome-looking. The process is just a nightmare." Our exact process is a secret, of course, but the denailing alone takes several days for a batch of barnwood.

“I love getting to work with passionate people who are driven to learn and produce the best pieces possible.” 

Inspiration comes from everywhere. We follow woodworkers and designers on Instagram, read architecture books, and even glance at each other's sketches (shhhh).

But when Lead Craftsman Skyler Masters cranks up Led Zeppelin or Outkast, that's when he truly gets inspired.

"I've loved art for a long time. I went to school for graphic design but I hated sitting in front of the computer. I really wanted to do sculpture and film photography and I wanted to do my own thing. I didn't want to do the computer so I picked up the hammer."

Skyler started an apprenticeship under a jack-of-all-trades sculptor. "I started building a lot of furniture with him. I didn't do a whole lot of welding back then, just stuff for friends and family. But I got a lot of confidence out of welding something up. The combo of sculpting and geometric design and function was amazing. I got heavy into furniture because it was useful art."

Skyler is our main metalworker. He's created everything from dozens of hairpin table legs to a massive nine-foot tall and 20-foot long feature wall at the new Jack Stack in Lee's Summit. "I love working with steel. I love knowing that everything I'm making will be here forever. That means I can't do a bad job. I have to make it worth making."

And like a true badass welder, Skyler gets his inspiration from badass sources. "I'm mostly influenced by other artists, not just metalworkers. Music drives me to make cool stuff. Anything original, like Tool or Pink Floyd or Outkast or of course Zeppelin. I also get inspired by reading. I think it really furthers the mind, and that's what I try to do with my art. Make people think. The book Be Here Now by Ram Dass has been a big influence. He talks a lot about the quest for knowledge through your art."

"I also really respect artist Alex Gray [best known for Tool's album covers]. He really meditates in his work and it shows. Although, I can't meditate and zone out when I'm welding or I'll burn my face off."

See the previous part here.

What childhood didn’t include LEGO and paper airplanes?

Andy Thacker, one of our designers, got his start in design at a young age. “I used to play with LEGO and I was obessed with making paper airplanes. I only cared about how cool they looked, not whether or not they could fly. I spent way more time making the planes then trying to fly them.”

Thus, a designer was born.

Andy received an architecture degree from K-State many years later. “I’ve always enjoyed drawing, but mostly just machines and buildings and guitars. I went into architecture because people would say, ‘Hey, you can draw, you should be an architect.’ It just ended up sticking.”

In school, he looked toward architects like Carlo Scarpa. “I wasn’t designing the way everyone else was and I thought I was doing it wrong. Then I had a professor say, ‘This isn’t wrong, look at Carlo.’ He was fascinated with little details and blowing them up.”

His biggest influence, though, was Peter Zumthor. “His book Thinking Architecture is all about viewing spaces through experience and memory. He writes about his grandmother’s kitchen door and how it felt to walk through it.

“When I design, I try to pull from memories like that. Certain spaces in my life like my old bedroom or a coffee shop create feelings and emotions that I want to evoke. I love that idea that we have certain memories that we associate with home, safety, and love.”

When designing the Tiny House, Andy pulled memories from New York. “I watched someone’s apartment when I lived in New York City. It was one of those old brownstones and he was renovating it to be all open. The light flooded in in layers and everything was white. I tried to design the sawtooth skylights in the tiny house to mimic that playful quality of light.”

“The first time I walked into the finished tiny house I said, ‘Yeah, this is exactly how that felt.’”

Memory and emotion are a huge part of what we do at Second Life Studios. We’re not out to make the flashiest most avant-garde thing you’ve ever seen. We know aesthetics matter, whether you realize it consciously or not. 

“Numbers.”

We show you what we're building all the time. Now we want to see what you're up to.

Post a photo of something you've built and tag us in it (along with the hashtag ‪#‎reclaimnouns‬) for a chance to win a stylish Second Life Studios shop hat!

Although our business is always changing, design will always be a hallmark of Second Life Studios. And it all started in France.

Creative Director Chris Gorney took a trip to Europe after his undergraduate studies. "I was at a bar in Nice, France, and met a designer while waiting to meet a friend. Her job just sounded awesome. I applied for the graduate program in urban design at the University of Kansas when I got back." He then help found Second Life Studios in 2012.

Gorney's always known there was a way to design space and do things right. "I love traveling and buildings. I've read way too many books on architecture and design. The Hidden Dimension by Edward Hall talks about how people engage spaces, and I love that. I can see what isn't but should be."

"Design makes the distance between people and objects valuable. I think we have a human impetus to influence our surroundings, not just react to them. And it's fun to build cool stuff."

Out of all the projects he's worked on at Second Life, his favorite is the Odradeks coffee shop in Brooklyn, New York. “I loved seeing the vision of the project realized.”

“Work is work. It’s fun sometimes and it sucks sometimes. But having a group of dudes that care makes even the hard time a lot easier. There’s always a dude that’s a few feet away to lend you an ear or a hand.”

We built a Tiny House. 

We built it on a custom flatbed trailer, it’s under 300 square feet, and the cedar rain screen is as functional as it is beautiful. The fully custom interior features saw-tooth dormers and bed loft and a custom headboard with indirect ambient lighting.

The tiny home trend has been blazing through newspapers and Pinterest, leaving a trail of equal parts “We should do that!” and “Who would want that?!”

But the trendiness and novelty are not the only reasons we built it.

We built it because we wanted to create a functional space worth living in. We believe in reclaiming nouns (people, places, things). Without places, things lack context. And without people, places lack meaning. We designed this house for the Averills to live in, not just to make good TV.

This speaks to our value of reclaiming unwanted space here in Kansas City. The tiny house will make a small unused lot usable again. It also takes the idea of living space and brings it into the realm of higher design. It is also provocative, and provocation is one of our core values. The status quo was meant to be broken.

The average age of our company is about 27, so we're all 90s kids around here. That means we remember an important remnant of a bygone age: the arcade. We grew up shoveling quarters.

Arcade/bar Up-Down decided to open a Kansas City branch after seeing wild success a year after their Des Moines location opened. Our shop foreman ran into the manager in an IKEA parking lot and struck up a conversation. One month later, we were standing in the old Hamburger Mary's in the Crossroads district of Kansas City, dreaming about a 90s-era arcade with 50 beers on tap.

So that's what we did. We designed and built everything but the arcade games themselves. From pub tables made out of reclaimed gym flooring to a table for the N64 system (four-player Mario Kart!) made out of a bowling alley, we wanted to evoke the arcades we grew up in.

Our designers worked tirelessly to fit a 40-person bar made out of reclaimed Douglas Fir (from a barn in Platte City, MO) in the oddly-shaped building, and topped it off with a behemoth: a 48-beer three-tiered tap system.

Up-Down has a lot of games (including 10 pinball machines), so we designed a striking mezzanine that overlooks six big-screen TVs and four Skee-ball lanes.

Since the bar was located in Kansas City's Crossroads district, we knew it would get a ton of foot traffic on the weekends (especially during the wildly popular First Fridays), so we designed a patio with robust picnic tables for drinking, smoking, and giant Connect Four.

The rooftop bar posed a different challenge. Since we get a fair amount of snow, it had to be a weather-friendly and comfortable place to enjoy views of the Kansas City skyline. A few iterations ago, the building had an extensive awning system spanning the entire roof, but the years had taken their toll. So we set up tables with umbrellas and revamped the bar with a repurposed bowling alley lane.

Brightergy, a local energy company, recently opened their two-floor headquarters in downtown Kansas City. Since they'd moved around a little before settling down here (they actually started in a garage in St. Louis), they wanted their new offices to be special.

We made several office furnishings for them. On their main floor, they wanted a unique reception desk. We designed and built an L-shaped desk out of repurposed cottonwood, accented with stippled polycarbonate and wood veneer slats.

They also wanted a stand-out conference table. They gave us some decommissioned solar panels, so we made a huge table with integrated power strips.

Since the space started life as a warehouse and was remodeled as an open floor plan, they needed a little more organization and navigation, so we designed and built several divider walls. To hold the space together, we used the same stippled polycarbonate and wood veneer slats that we used on the reception desk.

Upstairs, Brightergy wanted a small break area that was inviting and easily reorganized. We designed and created a long dining table out of more repurposed cottonwood with a matching bar-height eating table.

To make the space separate without completely closing it off, we designed and built a huge 30-foot accordion wall. Our metal department created an ingenious track and hanging system, as well as the steel frames. We then framed large panels of polycarbonate with cottonwood inside those steel frames. One person can easily store and deploy the wall.