About Me

I started Bentolabs because I needed a bed frame. Covid had just forced everyone into lockdown, and I was in the market for a new bed base. After browsing online, I found that 90% of the options were either unappealing or outside my budget. With my background in production design, having designed for most of my life, I decided to take matters into my own hands. For about fifteen years, I was the Red Hot Chili Peppers' production designer, creating all their live show designs throughout the 90s and into the early 2000s. Designing shows requires a particular skill set – everything that goes up must come down, again and again. A show has to fill an arena or stadium, then fit into trucks and planes to arrive somewhere the next day and be set up all over again.

So, back to the bed. I needed one, and I designed it myself. The first piece for Bento was my bed base, designed to assemble in a few minutes without screws or tools and come apart as easily as it went together. It's a large King-size bed, and I'm happy to say it's still in use and remains one of the better-looking bed bases around. However, making a bed for yourself is one thing; making it to sell to others is far more complicated, primarily due to shipping challenges, given its size.

As I pondered how to approach new designs, I knew they had to follow a similar aesthetic and be more compact for practical reasons. Around this time, I had just retrieved my old vinyl collection from storage and realized that if I needed modular shelving for my records, others probably did too. So far, it turns out I was right about that. I have numerous other designs in the pipeline that will make their way into the collection as I move forward, and I'll keep you informed about them as they come up – just make sure you're on the mailing list, which you can find below.

These days, I live in New Zealand with my partner and our three dogs. I design everything here. Some items I have made with my fantastic partner in Vietnam, Mr. Kenny, while others, like the UMAI speakers, I custom-make myself right here in New Zealand. Everything is shipped to the US and warehoused in Nevada, so if you're buying from within the US, it's almost like we're local.