Industrial Revolution

Ross McMillan, Designer

Industrial Artifacts, industrialartifacts.com

Jennifer Croll

photo by Jaime Kowal

Whenever Ross McMillan goes out for Chinese, he pockets his chopsticks to later mix stains in his studio. His creative resuscitation of disposables is no surprise: he’s the design genius behind cutting-edge furniture studio Industrial Artifacts.

Ten years ago, McMillan worked in celeb-obsessed Los Angeles as personal chef to the president of Warner Brothers’—until a car accident, and resulting neck pain, made days bent over a hot stove impossible. Planning to open a restaurant, he returned to his native Vancouver, where his mother was winding down the family business—a prominent machine shop and foundry. One look at the storeroom for machine-part casting molds, and McMillan’s heart broke. “The patterns were going to get thrown out, and it pained me! They’re the building blocks of our whole mechanical world. I’m a history buff, and I just thought, this is wrong.”

So McMillan rescued the carefully wrought wooden frames and shaped them into furniture for his future restaurant. When the restaurant plan proved too expensive, friends encouraged him to sell the pieces. A public show at a gallery proved McMillan’s artistic merit, and soon his chic-but-sustainable recycled furniture was a thriving business.

Nowadays, Industrial Artifacts boasts a studio, a showroom, a handful of staff, and a lot of acclaim. And the McMillan who now sits in a Chinese restaurant, dreaming up new destinies for cutlery, is a long way from L.A. But really, he’s the same guy with a different purpose. Kind of like the furniture he makes. “The idea of Industrial Artifacts is look-ing at all kinds of technology becoming obsolete and trying to make those pieces functional again,” he says. “You know, just flipping them upside down.”