Forty years at the bench, on the same patch of bush.

John was twenty-five, driving across the Nullarbor with a surfboard, when he came over the hill and saw the ocean.

That was 1982. He never went home. He spent the next six years working under a local Yallingup furniture maker, learning the structural properties of the region's slow-grown hardwoods. In 1988 he set up on his own and raised the workshop he still works in — jarrah framing, southwest limestone walls, built by hand on the patch of bush he'd bought on Blythe Road.

The gallery came a decade later. Pam Streater curates it. Today it shows John's furniture alongside the work of artists he admires — glass, painting, photography, sculpture — drawn from across the southwest.

“I wanted to create Australian culture in my furniture.”

The timber is jarrah, marri, and tuart — slow-growth hardwoods unique to the southwest, each chosen for the grain it carries. John sees himself, in his own words, as a custodian of the trees and timber in the area. The trees take decades to mature. The work asks the same of the maker.

Every piece carries an inlaid gum leaf — hand-carved into the timber, placed somewhere quiet.

You won't always see it. Inside a drawer, on the underside of a tabletop, tucked into the back of a cabinet. It is there on every piece John has finished since the beginning — an authentication, in his own hand, for future generations.

The work bridges into architecture, too. John collaborates as an integrated services partner with Mayfair Projects, the design-and-build studio run by his son Rowan Streater — fitting bespoke timber into homes the family has helped to shape from the ground up.