Artisans show off concrete style at Luke Works in Baltimore

A decade ago, artisan Mark Melonas was piecing together a living teaching sculpture at the Baltimore School for the Arts, doing some freelance graphic design and staging exhibitions at the Baltimore Museum of Industry.

And he was fooling around with concrete.

A friend was looking for a small sink for a tricky spot in a Canton rehab, and Melonas asked if he could give the project a try.

"I actually made it in my Bolton Hill apartment, carrying bags of cement up the steps," said Melonas. He hand-carved a mold and cast the sink in his kitchen.

One concrete sink led to another and another, and Melonas moved all that dust to the basement of his parents' home in Columbia.

"And it kind of got a life of its own," said the founder of Luke Works, now located in an old warehouse in Waverly. "That has defined a lot of what we do, but that's not all we do."

Melonas and a small team of craftsmen now create sleek and exotic pieces for the home in concrete and wood.

Much of their work is still sinks and countertops for kitchens and bathrooms, but they also coax fireplace mantles, free-standing bars and waterfalls out of their cement mixers, much of it sparkling with bits of glass or tinted in very un-concretelike colors.

"Customers come for the concrete, but they stay for the cabinet work," said Melonas, who has a degree in design and sculpture from the University of Maryland and a master's in furniture artisanry from the University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth.

His designs, and the work of Jacob Ulrich, his concrete specialist, and Seth Scott, his lead furniture maker, have a decidedly Scandinavian quality, a contemporary look with clean lines and voluptuous curves.

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Artisans show off concrete style at Luke Works in Baltimore