PICTURE ROCKS MESQUITE

"Woodworker Tom Bonomi started Tucson’s Picture Rocks Mesquite in 2010 after building his own sawmill. He had no experience in woodworking, let alone sawmill engineering, but he remembered an uncle’s mesquite dining table he’d seen when he was 13 as “the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen.” He wanted to try building mesquite furniture but was discouraged by the retail cost of the wood. So, like Flores, he went into business both milling and crafting fine furniture.

Every furniture designer develops a personal style, although mesquite resists efforts to make it conform to a hard-edged and right-angled world. Bonomi favors the “live edge” style, with one or more edges left unfinished to follow the natural geography of the tree’s shape. No shape, in his thinking, is too wild to become domestic. Sometimes he’ll fill cracks with crushed turquoise, which contrasts dramatically with a black epoxy background and the earth tones of the surrounding grain."

-Arizona Highways Magazine, March 2023