How to Build Impossible Things by Mark Ellison

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New York’s carpenter to the rich and famous reflects on his career.

Mark Ellison, the best carpenter in New York, spills the beans about the city’s most beautiful homes, the most rarefied and challenging projects, and the most demanding of clients.

Mark Ellison is regarded by many as the best carpenter in New York. A man with an affinity for challenging work, he has designed and constructed some of New York's most elaborate and expensive homes, and been profiled in the New Yorker. 

Over the past 40 years, Mark has worked on some of the most beautiful homes you have never seen, specialising in rarefied and challenging projects with the most demanding of clients. He built a staircase a famed architect called a masterpiece. He worked on the iconic Sky House, which Interior Design named the best apartment of the decade. He has even worked on the homes of David Bowie, Robin Williams, and others whose names he cannot reveal.

But before he was any of that, Mark was just 'a serial dropout' who spent his young adult years taking work where he found it and sleeping on friends’ floors. As a native of the old steel town of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, his route into the building trade and the mastery of a craft was unexpected, moving from construction labourer to carpenter and finally to project manager extraordinaire.

Now, at the age of 60, he has written his first book. In How to Build Impossible Things, Mark Ellison tells the story of his unconventional education in the world of architecture and design, and how he learned the satisfaction and joy that comes from doing something well for a long time. He takes us on a tour through the lofts, penthouses, and townhouses of New York's elite which he has transformed over the years and offers a window into what he has learned about living meaningfully along the way. Mark exposes the messy wiring behind the pristine walls - and the mindset that any of us can develop to build our own impossible things.

In this third episode, Mark describes the unbearable pressure of managing a five million dollar Central Park renovation project in searing heat with more than a hundred workmen and an impossible deadline. 

Abridged and produced by Jane Greenwood
Read by Demetri Goritsas
A Loftus Media production for BBC Radio 4

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Book of the Week. New York's carpenter to the rich and famous reflects on his career.

Mark Ellison, the best carpenter in New York, spills the beans about the city's most beautiful homes, the most rarefied and challenging projects, and the most demanding of clients.

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