“When we build, let us think what we build forever…” John Ruskin
Shea Alexander’s family joked that he would end up a hermit on a mountainside making furniture. A native to the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia, Shea’s working-class parents and grandparents taught him to create with excellence and love his neighbors. In high school Shea apprenticed with a local cabinet maker, learning the demands of fulfilling client orders and installations. Weekends found him at the local woodturning guild, learning from craftsman fifty years his senior. When not working with his hands, Shea was escaping to the mountains to find adventure and solitude.
At eighteen, Shea’s path shifted when he moved to the Caribbean nation of Haiti. Five years of NGO work included earthquake aftermath, cholera epidemics and leading building projects. But it was Haiti’s mountains and her people that welcomed Shea when relief work got tough. Here he found a community of teachers among the farmers and laborers of the rural hill country.
Returning to the US, Shea spent the next seven years in the corporate world, specializing in operations, project management, and finance. Spare time was spent building furniture and dreaming of starting a family business. In 2018, Alexander Brothers was born. Shea left his career in August 2021 to work with his hands and his brothers in a shop they built together on his property in the Shenandoah Valley. As a maker he is passionate about keeping Appalachian heritage alive through the trades and arts.
Shea spends his days helping clients pick out lumber, sanding custom furniture orders, sipping scotch with a book, or watching his daughter play with her cat. His active social media presence and involvement in his local community are ways he welcomes all people to know and experience beauty in their everyday lives. But this enjoyment and creation of beauty is not for ourselves alone, but for the next generation. Shea hopes you will join him in leaving a legacy of creating beauty for the world yet to come.
“When we build, let us think that we build forever. Let it not be for present delight, not for present use alone: let it be such work as our descendants will thank us for, and let us think, as we lay stone on stone, that a time is to come when those stones will be held sacred because our hands have touched them, and that men will say as they look upon the labor and wrought substance of them, See! this our fathers did for us.”
- John Ruskin