FROM OUR FAMILY TO YOURS
Meet Andrew & Amanda
We’re so happy you found us! We are a husband + wife team, and an independent small family-owned business based in Portland, Oregon.
Andrew Moe
Designer/Craftsman + Owner
As designer/craftsman and owner, Andrew handcrafts each piece of furniture with exquisite attention to detail. He puts his heart into his designs, and designs patiently – experimenting, refining, standing back, in turns working and waiting for a new form to enter the world.
The Moe family affinity for woodworking stretches back to Andrew’s great grandfather, who sailed to America from Norway in 1872, and became a builder of creameries in southern Minnesota. Born in Minneapolis, Andrew grew up in the DC area, where as a child he watched his father work with wood. In the countryside of southern Maryland his dad built several structures with hand-hewn timbers gathered from a collapsed tobacco barn.
There was a band saw running in their garage some evenings, and handcrafted pine furniture throughout the kids’ rooms to show for it. Andrew’s brother Eric became a natural home builder and taught himself timber framing, in the early days of the green building movement. Throughout his life, Andrew’s mother, a design enthusiast who worked for years as an innovator in arts education, nurtured and encouraged his artistic interests in countless ways.
Andrew’s design education officially began at Princeton, where he discovered studio art. Several years after graduating, he worked as an apprentice for a furniture maker in Cambridge, Mass and soon thereafter enrolled full-time in the Massachusetts College of Art, where he studied 3-D design, focusing on sculpture and furniture making, In Boston he also discovered Argentine tango, which led to a decade of teaching that dance. One summer he made a dining table for his parents, and rediscovered his love of furniture-making. Before long, Studio Moe was born.
How to make a piece of furniture that is original, elegant, and lasting? Expose the joinery, work with devotion, allow the design to come forth organically – these are a few of the approaches that have served Andrew well through the years, along with his belief that wood is alive and inherently mysterious. Andrew feels fortunate to be able to work with America’s native hardwoods day in and day out, shaping them into dynamic heirloom furniture that (he hopes) will bring people delight for generations.
Amanda Yamaki Moe
Creative/Business Director + Owner
As creative/business director and owner, Amanda shapes the vision of the company and directs its growth, drawing on her innate sense of design, love for storytelling in all mediums, and years of hands-on development and production experience.
Born in Japan and raised in Hood River, Oregon, Amanda has always been drawn to innovative, functional, and high-quality design, particularly beautiful things for the home. Summers spent in Tokyo with her mother's side of the family helped shape her artistic sensibilities and honed her design instincts.
Amanda’s arts education began with performing, and as an undergraduate she studied theater and acting at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts. Following her desire to explore, she traveled far and wide, with stints living in New Mexico and New Orleans. Eventually she found herself drawn back to New York City. During her 12 years in NYC, her passion for music, writing, and photography, naturally led her to an early career in TV and Film production. When she transitioned into advertising, she found a new reach for her talents – post-producing commercial editorial and motion graphics for national and global television commercials. Upon returning to her home in Oregon, Amanda briefly continued working for creative agencies, specializing in web design and digital marketing, before turning her focus to building a design+furniture company with Andrew, her husband to-be.
With her Japanese American heritage at the heart of her work-style and creative process, Amanda loves finding ways to bring beautiful things into the world. She is grateful to her parents for passing on their entrepreneurial spirit, as well as for instilling in her a dedication to integrity and strong work ethic.
Above all, she feels blessed to be the mother of an extraordinary little girl, and believes that we are in need of optimism, thoughtfulness, and beauty – now more than ever. Whether writing or making, building a brand or crafting a creative strategy, Amanda draws on these inspirations, and her East/West sensibilities, to develop innovative ideas and inspired solutions.
At Studio Moe we design and create furniture to last for generations.