From garage tinkering to Architectural Digest, Matt Castilleja isn’t afraid of work

If there’s one thing that ties together the arc of furniture designer Matt Castilleja’s career, it’s the hustle. From bartending and random handyman jobs to being featured in Architectural Digest and having his pieces shown in New York, San Francisco and Atlanta, a dedication to putting in the work has been the bridge that Castilleja built with his own hands. 

When the recession hit in 2008, Castilleja was pursuing a master’s in architecture at UMKC. Rather than take on more debt for a career path he wasn’t completely sold on, he took the foundations of the design process he had learned and decided to forge his own way ahead. “I wanted to be a hands-on designer,” Castilleja says. “Sitting in an architecture firm didn’t interest me anymore.”

Castilleja started tinkering in his garage, then enrolled at Metropolitan Community College’s Business and Technology campus, where he earned a welding certification while bartending nights. That certification led him to a stint at Dimensional Innovations, where he learned precision metalwork. By his early 20s, Castilleja had slowly become the neighborhood’s go-to handyman. He bought a cheap welder from Northern Tool and started fixing gates and one-off jobs for the bars where he bartended. But he wanted more than odd jobs. He wanted a real education in the craft.

Castilleja’s aunt pointed him toward two mentors in Kansas City’s design world: furniture maker Dave Polivka and sculptor Tom Corbin. Polivka had a shop in an old building on Third Street, and Castilleja sought him out. “Who are you, and what are you doing here?” Castilleja recalls him saying during their first interaction. When Castilleja explained his desire to learn and work, Polivka wasn’t interested. But Castilleja just kept showing up until Polivka relented: He could stick around so long as he didn’t break anything or cut his hands off.

What followed was less an apprenticeship than a full immersion. Working unpaid, Castilleja built himself a small room inside the shop and showered at a nearby gym, effectively living above the furnace room for years while he learned traditional woodworking techniques. When hard times forced Polivka to close the business, he handed Castilleja the shop’s machines and materials as back pay for years of labor—and with an LLC already in hand, Castilleja took over the lease himself.

In the years following, Castilleja operated as what he calls “a hired gun,” building custom pieces from other people’s sketches just to keep the lights on. He began writing intellectual property clauses into his contracts so that any design development work he did beyond simply executing someone else’s exact drawings belonged to him. This let him keep building a paying business while also growing his own product line, piece by piece.

On the advice of sculptor Tom Corbin, Castilleja began showing at design trade fairs like the International Contemporary Furniture Fair in New York and WestEdge Design in Santa Monica. These appearances eventually landed him representation in showrooms in Atlanta, Los Angeles, San Francisco and New York. A trip to Italy for his 30th birthday reshaped his aesthetic further. Castelleja was struck by the way Italians integrated ancient stonework into contemporary spaces, treating marble almost casually. “How cool would it be to take something we perceive as precious and just kind of turn it on its head?” he remembers thinking. He began designing marble bases for his furniture soon after, elevating a material KC buyers rarely saw paired with locally made wood pieces.

Business accelerated further after Castilleja signed with a California showroom just before the pandemic hit. But with work drying up locally, he and his wife cold-called roughly 300 designers using contact lists pulled from old issues of Architectural Digest and Elle Decor. Several of those calls turned into projects that were later featured in both magazines.

These days, Castilleja is eyeing a new frontier: lighting. Working with a collection of antique cast-iron molds from the 1800s and a glass artisan, Castilleja’s studio is developing light fixtures blown from historic silhouettes and finished with a contemporary lens. It’s a natural extension of the philosophy that’s guided him since his days above the furnace room—pairing traditional craft with a modern eye. “I think there’s going to be a big resurgence for more traditional design, especially in lighting,” Castilleja says. 

Castilleja’s showroom is at 506 Grand Boulevard in the River Market, and his nearby 14,000-square-foot workshop is where all of it comes to life. For more information, visit mattcastilleja.com.

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