I'm Charles Quinn, owner of C W Quinn Furniture. Every piece on this site is my personal design, using costly, hand-selected lumber and laborious methods like dovetails and mortise and tenon joinery. I combine these techniques with my extensive architecture and product design background, creating modern furniture that will last many lifetimes.

I grew up on the North Shore of Massachusetts, spending my childhood making model houses out of toothpicks and drawing fantasy house plans – thanks to Mike Brady! Eventually, I outgrew my fabulous toothpick houses, and obtained an architecture degree at the Rhode Island School of Design. After RISD, a summer backpacking through Europe, and an internship at the San Francisco office of internationally prominent architecture firm Skidmore Owings & Merrill, I moved back to Boston, practicing architecture for several years at two of Boston’s most prestigious firms.

In 1991, I left architecture to start my own company: Robinwood/Boston, a giftware manufacturer, where I was the owner and chief product designer. Robinwood sold gifts and decorative items to many major retail chains and over four thousand specialty stores globally. Robinwood received many design awards, was 29th on the Inc. Magazine list of rapidly growing inner-city companies in 2000, and our Newton Centre retail store won a "Best of Boston" award from Boston Magazine.

About the same time, I became fascinated with furniture, designing and commissioning elaborate casework display pieces for my gift business. I fell in love with the sight, touch, and smell of wood, and soon wanted to create my own furniture. After thirteen years, twenty employees and seventy-two sales reps, I left the gift industry, and began to pursue my dream of making furniture with my own hands.

I attended the North Bennet Street School in Boston, one of the United States’ leading craft schools, to study furniture making. North Bennet teaches time-tested, labor-intensive handcraft processes. My husband Scott and I live in Boston with our pugs, Hugo and Lola. When I'm not making or designing furniture, we're often on a plane to some place we’ve never been before.