Captain's Tattooed Bureau

BDDW Tattooed Captain's Bureau in olmo leather with natural bronze hardware and feet. Four standard drawers, two shallow drawers, two cabinets.

Leather, bronze
95" X 22" X 36" H

About the Maker:
BDDW is known for highly-crafted, American-made, heirloom quality furniture and objects designed exclusively by artist Tyler Hays. Their products are made in their own Pennsylvania workshop by some of the most talented artists, artisans and engineers in the world. 

Tyler Hays (b. 1968) is an American artist, born and raised in rural Northeastern Oregon. Throughout his life, he has worked creatively and professionally in a wide array of mediums—painting, food, music, art, furniture, ceramics fashion, etc—with a through-line focus on material science and engineering. He often says the true unifying subject of his work is finding the lines between things. “The harder you look the more similar every thing becomes.” Much of the art, for Hays, is the alchemy of finding these connections.

Hays grew up with a strong desire to make everything in his universe from scratch. This foundational impulse started very young—sewing and cooking, taking apart his toys—and followed him to art school, where he mixed his own paints and made his paint brushes from scratch with hand pounded silver ferrules. His interests and fluencies are surprisingly expansive yet always centered around the same soup-to-nuts compulsion and fetish-level research into the deconstruction of objects down to their elements.

While painting continues to be his primary and most consistent medium, Hays has become best known for BDDW, a 25 year deep-dive obsession centered around his unique, refined-yet-playful design aesthetic and penchant for exploring the limits of craft. The company itself is often as intriguing as the products it sells with head scratching segues into a citywide archery club or developing an internal auction platform to sell its products.