The vulnerability of the Maker.
What does that mean, exactly?
The physics definition of work itself, measured by the distance an applied force has moved an object. The applied force being the Maker in the act of designing and building, moving his or her effort toward a completed product that sells. That not only resonates with an audience and patronage that in turn supports the Maker’s compulsion to create, but defines the distinction between an applied force and the rhetoric of critiquing that force.

Although the cornerstone of the prowell methodology is the signature wood garden gate, the website features a passel of products within the genre of Landscape Furnishings. Custom wood driveway gates, custom wood garden arbors, custom wood fences, porch swings and porch benches, post caps, and even an eclectic offering of lighted garden columns. 95% of everything presented, we’ll note, as original designs by Charles and Ben. The development of the products themselves is an ongoing, never-ending orgy of design and woodworking methodology alongside a tranquil addiction to graphic design and a fussbudgety compulsion toward pleasing ourselves with a level of content–words–drawn from a sprinkling of whimsy and relevance.
A pastime as a means of support, yes, but within a medium not so unlike the fine artist, the painter who approaches each canvass with little thought to the needs and wants of an audience and patronage. An obsessive interest that began with five custom wood garden gate designs that grew and flourished to the current 140+ original works. And with each new gate there is the consideration toward how it blends with those sites requiring an accompanying custom wood driveway gate or custom wood fence and complimenting garden arbors and on and on.

The process is genetically automatic. It comes easily. While the corroborating satisfaction beyond the shop is the link to you, interacting with you, and ultimately providing you with a resulting experience that resonates for the lifespan of your purchased product. Forever, basically.

It’s only once. One opportunity to live our lives from toddlers to antiquarians under the premise that one’s life is one’s own personal and private work of art. Not always shared or exposed or promoted with the pomp and circumstance of achievements, results, or, well . . . medals. More so, the culmination over decades of this addiction to rhythm, to efficiency, to those moments, those days, those weeks and months and years on end when the stroke is good.

The Site itself is experienced, apparently, on several levels. There are the primary image links above, followed by the offerings spread within the respective galleries. Followed by the Pages, with their multiple examples. A table of Galleries can also be found at the bottom of every product page, as well as the Top Main Header of links that follow you throughout the Site. On the Home Page–this page–and all the Product Portal pages, there is a column of links along the left margin toward more specific topics and discussions. And of course there is always the Site Map, linked in the Main Header, where everything is linked, as well as links to pages found nowhere else.

There are among you those who are determined to experience the entire site. Every page, every word, all 650 pages and over 3,200 images. Their methodologies vary, breaking down the navigation like a puzzle and for some of you–with surprising confession–accomplish this at bedtime.. A last parting solace to set the way, perhaps, for a night of whimsical dreams . . .

Backhouse Data
by Adlai Means
Assisted Linguist

n the early 90’s, drawing on a combination of skills developed decades earlier through an apprenticeship with his father (a custom homebuilder)–his grandfather (a furnituremaker), his mother (an artist/illustrator), and a heavy dose of schooling, Prowell considered the methods required to design and produce custom wood garden gates of exterior joinery that would be exposed to the elements and subjected to dimensional variations with the changing seasons. Custom wood garden gates with the appropriate joinery and integrity of his years as a furniture designer/craftsman, combined with the tutelage of a builder’s knowledge for structure, stress loads, spans, site demands, and of course the confusing and inconsistent miasma of allowing wood to breathe–to expand and contract without constraint across the various climatic zones of a country the size of America.

But there is more. More than the structural properties. There is a talent for design. Inherent, to some degree, but furthered under a long apprenticeship of being raised in the appropriate environment, furthered with the advantages of what could be taught, and learned, in a 5-year college curriculum.

There is no hardware within our wooden gates. There are no screws or nails or metal straps. There is only the joinery, a practiced and long developed eye for design, and a product drawn from countless prototypes that will not sag and will stand proud as a work to be appreciated for decades and decades. Prowell’s Garden Gates are commissioned throughout the country, and every commission begins here, on this site.

Concurrently, Prowell’s Custom Wood Fence Designs establish the high watermark for this genre. The first-impression view of any property is no longer relegated to the same wood fences we have all seen. Some are of course very nicely done, by competent and qualified carpenters. But nevertheless, a continuing extension of an ongoing theme in fence design that left plenty of room for something different. Once again, as with the Garden Gates and all the Prowell products, our Garden Fence relies on joinery, the highest grade of clear dry quarter-sawn cedar, and an eye for design honed over 40 years in business–designing, developing, and crafting innovative works of functional art.

Prowell’s Custom Wood Driveway Gates can be viewed on Gallery #2. The designs and methods of construction are complimentary to the Wood Garden t . x Gate and Fence. Almost all of the Garden Gate Design options are available as a Driveway Gate.

An extensive selection of our signatory Garden Arbors are designed as extension assemblies to your existing Gate or Pilaster openings. The Custom wood garden arbor arrives fully assembled and simply mounts onto the tops of the gate posts. As an arbor, they accentuate masonry wall openings or find their way anywhere within the landscape as an architectural detail.

Introducing the Prowell wood outdoor porch swings and porch benches, where we establish both a sense of workmanship and physical poetry to the featured approach of a genre too long ignored, as well as the connotations of leisure and conversation associated with this.

We are proud to represent Rocky Mountain Hardware for our primary offerings in Bronze Gate Hardware.

Enjoy your visit.

* The above content marks the debut of Adlai Means. A walk-on hired on the strength of a polished spiel and a resume listing a decades-long tenure with the Hallmark Card Company. Although provided with an outline & synopsis, he appears to have collated his data and extrapolated pro rata without a trace of empathic climax or sympathetic syntax.

Prowell and Prowell