Mark Warren Designs

Thank you for stopping by,

I have not had a boring life! Raised in rural Essex alongside a large bunch of brothers and with energetic and hard working parents I started out as a trainee reporter off Fleet Street which was an eye opening experience. I then became an estate agent  as there seemed to be as much accuracy in estate agents details as some tabloid press reports!

From London I moved to the Cotswolds  becoming involved in property marketing, management, and funding.

I then moved to Bristol living on a barge on the Floating Harbour and running an estate agency group for a life insurance company - an experience that made me aware that I was not for the corporate life. Attending Directors board meetings went in my diary as "Bored" meetings!!

I ended up acquiiring the Bristol based estate agency business and moved into acquiring properties for clients in a recession and doing Buy to Let before it existed. I also became involved in mortgage broking and property finance.

In 2003 I moved to the Somerset Levels and alongside my wife ran a group of companies but in 2020 on the advice of professioanls we put a building firm into administration and experienced a tsunami of problems and ill will.

One can expect knock backs in life and from time to time once can go down the wrong road. Moving from property service to physical building was a mistake. Handling  wily subcontractors and dealing with slippery lenders  moving goal posts made herding wild cats look easy. A period in my life I could have done without but I am a positive person and  believe you have toget back on the horse when the bugger lobs you off.

All this just as Covid occurred. I had on a whim converted an old hedge cutter into a metal swordfish which I mounted on a barn.

In Lockdown I was meant to clear rubbish from the said barn but unfortunately somebody gave me a welder and I thought to myself  "How hard can it be ?"

I displayed some of the creations in the Lane by the house and as many people were walking during Covid it created much interest.

Suddenly villagers were dropping off old tools, equipment and machines at the house and  rather than empty the barn I started to fill it.

Jane my long suffering partner suggsted that I actually did something with the donations so I started to look at them and how I could repurpose them.

From old bicycles I have created:-

Animal sculptures

Lamps & lights

Bar stools

Old hand  tools have been recycles as wall and desk lamps

Spanners hammers screwdrivers have all re-emmerged as works of art.

Recycling and reusing everything is important to me and am an avid beachcomber frequenting the north Somerset shoreline. Neighbours and locals donate materials for me to repurpose and having started out extremely simply, I am reinvesting in better equipment so can now expand the range of work produced.

I had previously designed and built a shepherds hut and I have had imput into numerous residential and commercvial property conversions and work with a small team to handle design and planning applications for property owners in the South West

Nothing is impossible we are just limited by your imagination & it would be a dull old world if we were all the same!