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Timothy HoltonTimothy Holton was born and raised in Berkeley, California, where, in 1975, he began making frames at the highly regarded shop Storey Framing. His frame designs arise from a lifelong fascination with architecture, stimulated early on while living and traveling in Italy and Greece, and cultivated at home by ongoing awareness of the Bay Area’s great early twentieth century architects and designers (figures like Bernard Maybeck and Julia Morgan). At least as strong an influence were the vernacular brown shingle and Craftsman homes of Berkeley and rural northern California — especially those of the tiny “summer town” of Inverness, in Marin County, where his family owns a 1914 bungalow. In more recent years he has studied the California Decorative Style work of turn-of-the-century San Franciscans Lucia Kleinhans Mathews and Arthur Mathews. While Tim only feels truly at home in Berkeley and among the hills, mountains and shores of California, numerous stays in England have put him under the spell of the English Arts and Crafts Movement and the medieval roots of the Arts and Crafts spirit. He also credits two summers in Norway during his youth entranced by the landscape and ancient folk architecture of that country. In 1988, after studying History at the University of California at Santa Cruz, and enduring a brief career in live theater, Tim turned his attention back to picture framing, undertaking to develop his skills in joinery and carving that distinguish his work. In the Spring of 1993 his furniture and mirrors were displayed at the Oakland Museum’s special gallery of contemporary artisans during the Museum’s exhibition “The Arts and Crafts Movement in California: Living the Good Life”. The warm response spurred him later that year to open Holton Furniture and Frame. (In 1999 the business name was changed to Holton Studio Frame-Makers to reflect the shop's exclusive focus on picture and mirror frames.) Tim still lives in Berkeley with his wife, Stephanie McCoy, a writer (her biography of California Arts & Crafts figure Lucia Kleinhans Mathews, Brilliance in the Shadows, was published by the Arts and Crafts Press) and their daughter, Ella. Articles by Timothy Holton
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