Marc Mandon:

I spent most of my childhood in Arizona, and ten years as a young man in California. I met my wife, Mignon, in Nashville and we now have three children.

In the early 1980's I graduated from a two-year boat building program at Bates Vocational Tech, in Tacoma, Washington. I then moved with my family to St. Croix, in the U.S. Virgin Islands, where we spent the next fifteen years. My first three years there were spent building and repairing all manner of boats. I worked for two years in a furniture restoration shop run by Ed Donaldson, a master refinisher, where I was responsible for all the carpentry work.

When Ed's shop was destroyed by a hurricane, I regrouped and built my own shop, where for the next ten years I specialized in major restoration of antique furniture, with special emphasis on West Indian and mahogany furniture. I would occasionally build new furniture, sometimes for customers and often for my own enjoyment. When time allows, I still construct new pieces using traditional methods of joinery. A number of pieces restored in my shop have been displayed in Architectural Digest, for the months of December 1996 and July 1997, in articles about St. Croix and Michael Connors' shop in New York City.

My family and I moved in the summer of 2000 to Asheville, North Carolina, where my shop, Mountain Restoration, is located at 191 Lyman Street. I continue to work with various types of antique wood furniture, and specialize in mahogany and my own hand rubbed finish. I am also building a series of tables from West Indian mahogany.

In October of 2001 I traveled to Havana, Cuba to teach a weeklong course on antique furniture restoration at the City Historian's Workshop, by invitation of Fundacion Amistad of East Hampton, New York.