Why custom furniture and hollow wooden surfboards?

I come from a creative family and as a kid I used to hang around furniture sales rooms and antique stores with my father, who was an antique dealer. My grandfather was into garden design and my mother had a fashion label and then a house painting business and makes sculptures and paintings. She’s also a very unconventional and frequent renovator, with her home being her own special work in progress. As well as being my mentor she’s also been my biggest client. I have helped transform her house into a bed & breakfast.

I started out building skate ramps as a youngster, then studied fashion design in the UK and had my own clothing label there for 8 years.

When I came to Australia in 2000, I fell into furniture building by accident, a friend asked me to build a bookshelf, then a computer desk, then a daybed. I liked working with wood so much that I spread the word amongst friends and pretty soon I was building kitchen benches, coffee tables, shelves and working on designs for lamps, so I made it official and launched Nathaniel Grey – Lamps and Furniture.

Surfing is very much part of my lifestyle, so the natural progression was to start building my own hollow wooden surfboards.