Fallen Oak Furniture
Oakville, as its name reflects, started out as a lumber port and mill town, and Marc Gagnon grew up in a house built by one of Oakville’s early mill owners.
Still, as he went through Appleby College and then to St. Francis Xavier for business, Marc didn’t envisage a career in wood. The Town had moved well beyond the source of its original prosperity, and most of the oaks were gone. (So much lumbering happened that the banks of the Sixteen eroded and the current slowed, eliminating the viability of a proposed hydraulic power project and bankrupting many prominent citizens of the time.) Most of Marc’s contemporaries were hitting the GO train for the high-rise office towers of Toronto.
But not Marc. Business school taught Marc many things, but he became certain of one thing in particular: he wasn’t cut out to sit behind a desk. The journey to finding his passion, even from there, was not a straight line.
Realizing he liked physical work, and was a tactile learner good with his hands, he first looked for the highest paying trades, which led him to qualify as a mason at Conestoga College. But that work too had too little room for creativity. He tried his hand at contracting, finishing a community college programme at George Brown in 2017.
On the way there though, his education was put on pause by the community college strike. During the interruption, he started playing around with cutting and shaping boards. He immediately knew he had found his passion: custom woodworking. This was something he could do for work but love to do as well. What started as a way to kill time became a way to create functional art. He fell in love with the grains and shades of different woods and the tactile connection he could have creating special furniture pieces imbued with meaning for their owners.
Marc opened Fallen Oak Furniture, the name a nod to Oakville’s past connection to trees and wood, but also to sustainability, another of Marc’s values. Instead of using harvested lumber for his creations, Marc seeks out interesting pieces to make furniture, charcuterie boards, and whatever pieces his customer wants. “Wood,” he says, “is a carbon store. As it grows it absorbs carbon. When it falls to the ground that carbon is released again into the atmosphere, much faster than when it was growing. On a small scale, by using fallen timber we keep that carbon sequestered. And we save the customer money on the raw materials for their project.”
One of his customers brought in a piece of wood that had sat unused in her late father’s workshop for 50 years…it’s now a permanent memento of her Dad and his happiness at working with wood. When a much beloved tree has to come down for safety or health reasons, or trees fall in the woods, Marc, or you, can make something of beauty from it. For larger projects or if you don’t have the right wood for the piece you want, Marc has connections with arborists who have to fell trees for health or safety reasons, and this saves the trees from the mulcher and keeps costs down for the arborists and the furniture buyer.
Marc shares his passion through Fallen Oak’s DIY furniture workshops. A complete novice can come in for one of four available classes a week, enjoy locally catered food, and leave with a woodworking piece of their own creation. You can come with friends or family. (In Covid, classes are limited to four and all must be in the same social bubble.)
Fallen Oak Furniture
These workshops are an embodiment of another major reason Marc loves his business. He comes from a large extended family and treasures the time spent around the table, breaking bread, sharing stories, and playing games. Making things together has a lot in common, and special tables or serving boards can become part of the memories that connect family and friends.
Oakville may not make its living from lumbering today, but one lifelong Oakville resident has found a way to connect to that past and enrich the present with beauty and companionship: and build a business a whole lot more in harmony with the environment than Oakville’s first wood-related industries!
You can reach Fallen Oak Furniture on Instagram @fallenoakfurniture at 289-772-5454 or go to the website at fallenoakfurniture.com. You can work with Marc to design customer furniture or come in and experience the tactile joy of working with wood and your friends or family.
