Ted Christensen & Winston Morris, DUSK

Los Angeles, California
Interview by Sheila Lam
Photographs by Justin Chung

Over the past few months, I've been meeting with Ted Christensen and Winston Morris in their Los Angeles workshop, and when they speak about their work, I keep coming back to one thing: presence. There's a quality of attention in how they approach everything, from the awareness of the wood they're working with to the stories their clients bring, and even the busying hum of their studio as projects make themselves known.

DUSK sits somewhere between the world of traditional craftsmanship and contemporary design, and maybe that's exactly where it needs to be. In a time when so much feels temporary and digital, flat, and artificial, DUSK is creating things that feel permanent, rooted in tactility, just as essential human experiences have always been rooted in the physical world we can touch and feel.

Their backgrounds differ, yet they complement each other perfectly. Winston grew up in Seattle, learning woodworking from his uncle, "a back-to-the-land kind of hippie," as he puts it with a grin before moving to New York City. Ted's path led him through Michigan, where he worked as a carpenter and studied architecture, ultimately finding his way into New York's art scene. But Los Angeles brought them together. A city, Winston reflects, has "such a respect for craft and design, as well as design literacy." There's something about LA that lets you be both serious about your work and relaxed about yourself.

What strikes me most about their process is how they approach each project not with a predetermined vision, but with curiosity. "We always approach projects from the material, with the material in mind first," Winston explains, and you can see what he means when you watch them work. They're not imposing ideas onto wood; they're having conversations with it.

The shift in their practice occurred when they began working with old-growth redwood trees, which are sometimes hundreds of years old, sourced from naturally fallen or reclaimed pieces of timber. "You're channeling this ancient past through your work," Winston tells me, and there's a reverence in his voice that makes you understand this isn't just about sustainability or aesthetics. It's about connection, to time, to place, to something larger than the immediate moment.

Ted describes their design process as “A dialogue. It's like a start, stop, and response. Take one step, see where you're at, respond to what the material can do, where the material wants to go, where the material is good and bad, and then you adapt the design." Watching them work, you realize they're not just making furniture, they're translating. Taking the language of a thousand-year-old tree and helping it speak to a contemporary living room.

This collaborative approach extends beyond just the two of them and their materials. Their clients become part of the conversation too, and there's something refreshing about how they resist the typical designer-client dynamic where expertise flows in only one direction. Instead, they create space for genuine exchange, for the kind of creative partnership that makes the final piece feel inevitable rather than arbitrary.

They split their time between the city and more remote places—backpacking, surfing along the coast—and you can feel how these different environments feed their work. It's not just about inspiration in the usual sense, but about maintaining perspective. "If you have an old-growth redwood slab in your house and this thing is a thousand years old, it's almost spiritual," Winston says. "It's about being connected to everything that's around you and not trying to obscure that."

There's something deeply human about this approach that feels increasingly rare. In a world that often prioritizes efficiency over connection, speed over reflection, DUSK insists on a different rhythm. Their pieces carry what Ted calls "a connection to a human scale and a human hand that I feel is noticeable." You can see it in the way a joint is cut, in the slight irregularities that machine production would eliminate, in the way the grain tells its own story alongside the story of its making.

What DUSK understands, and what makes spending time with Ted and Winston so compelling, is that craft is never just about technique. It's about relationship: to materials, to place, to the people who will eventually live with what you make. Their work becomes a kind of bridge, connecting the deep time of material creation to the intimate time of daily life, the wildness of natural substance to the refinement of thoughtful design.

In the end, DUSK's approach feels like an antidote to so much of what feels disconnected about contemporary life. Not in a nostalgic way, but in a way that suggests other possibilities. That we can make things that last, that we can work in partnership rather than domination, that we can create beauty that deepens rather than diminishes over time. Their workshop isn't just a place where furniture gets made; it's a place where an older way of being in the world quietly persists, offering anyone who encounters their work a chance to remember what it feels like to be connected to something enduring. ●