About Deano Builds
I’m Dean, a maker, woodworker and artist based near Colac in regional Victoria.
I’ve spent most of my working life in practical jobs. I started a butchering apprenticeship as a teenager and later spent many years working in the dairy industry. Making things was always there in the background, but for a long time it had to fit around work, family and everything else that came with everyday life.
That changed when I moved to Western Australia.
For the first time, I had a workshop of my own and the opportunity to spend serious time building. In 2024 I started the Deano Builds YouTube channel as a place to document what I was making and share the process as it actually happened. I wasn’t interested in pretending every project went perfectly. Figuring things out, changing direction and solving problems along the way became a big part of what the channel was about.
Within its first year, the channel had grown to more than 13,000 subscribers.
Since then, I’ve returned to the Colac region where I grew up, and moved Deano Builds into a very different kind of workshop. With considerably more room and some serious machinery I now have the freedom to tackle much larger builds.
That move has also changed what I want Deano Builds to become.
I’m now taking on selected local commissions and developing a body of work centred increasingly around large wooden sculpture. My oversized dinosaurs are a big part of that direction. These days they take the familiar little wooden puzzle dinosaurs and rebuild the idea at a scale where they become impactful sculptural objects.
I still build furniture, workshop projects and whatever else catches my interest, but I’m deliberately keeping the scope of Deano Builds broad. I’m most interested in commissions where I can bring my own ideas and problem solving to the project, rather than reproducing something from a photograph or working to a predetermined design.
Everything that comes out of the workshop is made by hand using traditional workshop machinery and tools. There’s no CNC production line and no factory behind Deano Builds. If I make something for you, I’m the person who designed it, cut it, assembled it, finished it and probably changed my mind about part of it halfway through.
For me, that's the interesting part.