FURNISHING DESIGN & INTERIOR WORK: Matthew can apply his expertise in liturgical spatial planning and design skills to create designs for new woodwork, altarpieces, tabernacle shrines, altars, pulpits, altar rails, and organ cases. He will work with local craftsmen of your choice to enrich your church or chapel with noble beauty. While his background is predominantly in western Catholic liturgy, art, and design, Matthew is also familiar with the worship, history and traditions of Byzantine Catholicism, Eastern Orthodoxy, the Anglican Communion and Presbyterianism, and can produce solutions tailored to your specific congregation.
Matthew is also able to undertake some interior and decoration projects depending on location, and can suggest new color-schemes, moldings and ornamentation to bring light and life to a drab interior.
His furnishings currently can be seen in a historic church in the Russian Far East, and he has a number of American projects on the drawing board at present.
LITURGICAL OBJECTS: Matthew has considerable interest in the design of liturgical plate, vestments, tapestries, candlesticks, and can discuss the possibility of designing new liturgical elements to fit your existing church or chapel. He is currently at work on a preliminary design for a tapestry which will hang in a parish school in Texas.
DESIGN CONSULTING: Matthew would enjoy to deploying his design skills and understanding of architectural history to assist an architect of record in creating a fitting new work of ecclesiastical architecture.
Matthew has worked closely with architectural firms in the past and has a good working relationship with a talented traditional firm that has done many projects across the United States, and would be happy to recommend them for new construction.
ALL CONSULTATIONS & ESTIMATES ARE FREE.
At left: the altarpiece of Most Holy Mother of God Catholic Church, the historic proto-cathedral of Vladivostok, Russia. From 2006-2009 Matthew designed an extensive range of new furnishings (including a hand-crafted marble altar and font, this 40-foot-tall altarpiece and various other shrines) for the church, which had previously been thoroughly gutted during the years of Soviet rule. The church was reconsecrated, with some of Matthew's new furnishings, in 2008. For more, see here. Architect of record: Pavel Manomov.
