Nathan Wiens is a Canadian naturalistic designer and woodworker. Wiens founded Chapel Arts in the Railtown district of Vancouver in 2006. Childhood and youth Nathan Wiens is the son of architect Clifford Wiens and artist (pottery) and educator Patricia Wiens. The family visited art galleries, attended powwows, and played music at home. As a child, the young Wiens was also a potter. He says his father had "immeasurable influence" on him: "He and my mother created a rich creative environment for my five sisters and myself... He has been a tough act to follow, but he's left me room to rise as my own man." In high school, Wiens played in a band called "Nick Danger" with Colin James. Career In the early to mid 1980s Wiens worked in the music industry "as a builder, roadie and performer" in the "underground" punk music scene. Wiens travelled to Vancouver, British Columbia for the first time during Expo 86 to work on installations with Edward Poitras and over time established himself there working as an artist and producer. Woodworker Wiens is known as a craftsman of naturalistic custom wood furniture pieces, but he is sometimes willing to reproduce some pieces, such as dining room table with a curved indent which proved popular. In Vancouver, his work may be found in stores such as ALife and John Fluevog (the biggest client), as well as the Shine nightclub and the Edgewater Casino. Process Wiens describes his woodworking process as "tunnelling", something influenced by his experience with pottery as a child:We shuffle a deck of all these parts that create shapes, out of flat panels, kind of like a topographical map, using the CNC machine. Like architectural models do the landscape – in layers. We do this with wood, on budgets sometimes modest, sometimes grand. Large scale pieces have come out of the process in the manner of matrioschka, one piece fitting inside the other. Studio In about 2004, Wiens was looking for a place to relocate his Yaletown furniture business. He found a garage at Dunlevy and Cordova in Downtown Eastside, but had to buy the Armstrong Funeral Chapel as part of the deal. The studio has 22-foot ceilings topped by strips of Douglas fir, and "piles" of reclaimed fir beams which he acquired from torn down warehouses, as well as local walnut, maple, butternut and oak. In a 2009 interview, he remarked: "Most