Our Story
ohio grown bamboo
I visited a natural bamboo grove years ago, brought home a single culm, and it has just kept growing, right here in southern Ohio! It’s a super sustainable carbon sink, resilient, useful, and beautiful. After the realization I had a yard full of it, and I was going to be getting more and more as it grew, combined with a love of craft and tinkering, I started to play and experiment with the techniques for creating cool stuff out of bamboo.
After a few years of pretty much just making messes, my experience at doing so began to pay off and wonderful wind chimes and other things begun to take shape. I also began to realize that most of the bamboo gifts being sold were from overseas and not very creatively designed, or utilize harsh chemicals and machine manufacturing.
So DomesticBamboo was born, Americans growing and crafting cool bamboo stuff for other Americans. Sure, you could buy cheaper plastic import stuff at the big box retailers, but why? Try hand crafted artisan products from sustainable domestic grown bamboo!
Quality American craftsmanship
Bamboo offers legendary flexibility and strength, but can be a finicky raw material to work with. For starters it is nothing but grass. It splits and splinters, is susceptible to insect damage, and no two pieces are identical. Yet when treated with care, the results can be quite impactful, warm and inviting like an old friend, yet also tropical and exotic.
We use various open flame artistic techniques to heat treat our bamboo. While warm, burnishing with our orange oil and beeswax conditioner. This process brings the plants natural oils to the surface which hardens into a protective shell, and forces out the starches and moisture that attract insect damage, as well as give it some shine and visual texture. Additionally it slows the humidity transfer which leads to cracking and softens the edges for better handling. We also cut close to nodes, the thicker rings, for added strength and durability.
Perhaps most importantly, we’ve learned that bamboo has a mind of it’s own, and it’s best to allow the bamboo to tell us what it wishes to become, and not the other way around!
Our Goal
Our goal is simple, to make bamboo stuff that brings peace and harmony to the people! It is often misunderstood in the United States. Yet for those who stop and listen, it is a wonderful teacher, accessible yet mysterious. Spreading some of it’s energy through beautiful hand-crafted items benefits many and harms none.
We enjoy pushing the boundaries of creative artisan crafting using locally sourced bamboo plants, and have sold over 60 unique items made from bamboo, and continue to innovate new ways to make products with natural bamboo. No machine manufacturing, press-board, laminate, or molds… just one guy with two hands, making stuff from American bamboo.
All of our bamboo products are locally sourced and crafted carefully by hand.
“A man can sit in a bamboo house under a bamboo roof, on a bamboo chair at a bamboo table, with a bamboo hat on his head and bamboo sandals on his feet. He can at the same time hold in one hand a bamboo bowl, in the other hand bamboo chopsticks and eat bamboo sprouts. When through with his meal, which has been cooked over a bamboo fire, the table may be washed with a bamboo cloth, and he can fan himself with a bamboo fan, take a siesta on a bamboo bed, lying on a bamboo mat with his head resting on a bamboo pillow…He might then take a walk over a bamboo suspension bridge, drink water from a bamboo ladle, and scrape himself with a bamboo scraper.”
-William Edgar Geil “A Yankee on The Yangtze”
“If it can’t be done with bamboo, it probably shouldn’t be done!” -Fred Hornaday “Bambu Batu”