Our Story

We make furniture. One piece at a time.

The Studio

Walk into our 8,000 square foot workshop just outside Philadelphia and you'll find dedicated makers focused on their craft — people obsessing over details that most people will never notice. Machines humming. Hands working. A room full of people pouring their heart and soul into something they won't even get to own.

It's serious work. We just don't take ourselves too seriously doing it.

Every piece in our collection and every custom commission is built here, by this team. Made to order, made by hand, made to last well beyond the people who commission them.

How it Started

Paul Mencel and his wife were young, newly settled in Philadelphia, and looking for furniture that felt like them. Not generic. Not store-bought. Not the kind of thing everyone else had.

So Paul built it himself.

He spent a weekend in the garage — heads down, hyperfocused, the way he gets when something matters — and when his girlfriend came home, there was a dining table where there hadn't been one before. They were both impressed. More importantly, it felt right in a way that nothing from a store ever had.

At the time, Paul was the bassist in Bel Heir, a band signed to RCA Records. His wife suggested an Etsy store. So he opened one — and started selling furniture from the back of a tour van. He'd come off stage in San Francisco and check his phone to find an order notification. He hired his dad to cover production when the tour ran long. He made it work.

When RCA dropped the band in 2018, the furniture kept growing. When COVID ended touring in 2020, the furniture took over completely. One thing sunset. Another rose.

That first table is still in the family.

Philadelphia

Philadelphia is home. It's where Paul has lived most of his life, where he met his wife, where he built that first table in the garage.

But it's also something bigger than that.

Philadelphia was a manufacturing city before almost anywhere else in America — a place where people built things seriously, where craft and industry ran side by side for generations. That tradition never fully left. The old warehouse spaces are still here. The makers are still here. Creatives priced out of New York and other cities have been arriving for years, drawn by the space, the culture, and the sense that you can still make something real here.

PTC is part of that lineage. Not as nostalgia — as a living continuation of it.

We Really Give a Damn.

We believe that making things one at a time gives them something that manufacturing cannot replicate.

A piece of furniture was once a living tree. It passes through the hands of a maker who puts their full attention into it. It arrives in someone's home and takes on the energy of the people who live there. The passion moves through. From the wood, to the maker, to the owner.

That might sound like a lot to ask of a dining table. But sit around one long enough and you'll understand what we mean.

We want you to feel proud of what you own. To know that a person made it — not a factory, not an algorithm, not a warehouse on the other side of the world. A person, in a workshop just outside Philadelphia, who cared about getting it right.

That's what we make. That's why we make it.