Brendan was born and raised in Côte d’Ivoire, where one of his earliest memories of making something was building a swimming platform and water slide with his father for the weekends his family spent at the Ébrié Lagoon. When he was eight, Brendan’s family moved to Washington, D.C., where his father became chief curator of the Smithsonian National Museum of African Art.

While studying Sculpture at Oberlin College, Brendan led the design and construction of a timber frame barn on his family’s property in Maine, where together with his siblings he founded Islesford Boatworks, a nonprofit youth boat building program. He served as the program’s first boatbuilding educator and is currently president of the board.

After several years lobster fishing on the Pandora and the Amy Yvonne, Brendan completed his master’s degree in Industrial Design at Rhode Island School of Design and then decamped in 2010 for Los Angeles, drawn by the thriving network of fabricators in Southern California. That same year he established the Studio to create products that have meaning beyond aesthetics and trend.

Recent projects include the 10×10 Tea House built in 2015-16, the Sea Sauna, a cedar-shingled sauna built on a finger float during the pandemic summer of 2020, and the historic renovation of the Blue Duck, a National Park Service building in Islesford, Maine.

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