Alexander came of age working on an old family farm tucked in the wild mountains of Venezuela. A land so fertile with water sources so pure that mangoes, coffee, bananas, oranges, tangerines, avocados grew in reckless profusion. They still do. The surrounding forest remains dense with original growth acacia, cypress, poplar, cedar, teak and oak. It’s a forest his family protects to this day. That’s where Alexander’s bred-in-the-bone reverence for nature and the environment took root.

It found a different, expression when Alexander studied with country’s legendary puppeteers and toymakers. He learned how to hand carve exquisitely expressive marionettes and performed with his teachers all over his country. He made singular wooden toys, full of moving parts, that captivate. He stretched his creativity, fashioning detailed folk-art miniatures that have become collectors’ items. When he settled in Brooklyn decades ago, Alexander turned his eye and camera lens on the city, capturing images of the extraordinary in the mundane, the intimate in the overpowering. And always, there was woodworking.

Studio 19 WoodWorks is a reflection of Alexander’s artistic passions and his strong ties to the land. He infuses each project with a fine-tuned sense of balance and harmony derived from a deep appreciation of texture, shape, color and light. He puts it all together with a lifelong respect for nature, design integrity and down-to-earth practicality. And the results? Simply beautiful.

Anne Adams – Studio 19 Design Consultant, Resident Pragmatist

A journalist, writer, filmmaker, and die-hard home design enthusiast, Anne’s helped an assortment of friends and clients figure out how to beautifully maximize their spaces. It started with renovations of her own homes and grew to include a small coterie of DIY renovators and interior designers who needed hand making their places real-world wonderful. Her interest grew into a fascination that’s taken her from fine arts museums and galleries, to open studios, craft and design expos. Naturally, it segued into something more.

Her collaboration with Studio 19 WoodWorks began organically enough with a complicated set of built-ins that had to be consonant with eccentric century-old Georgian architecture. In a surprising and fruitful collaboration with Alexander Barreto, they came up with the design and found just the right materials. The finished built-ins look as if they’d been there forever. For a complex project, it was a pretty seamless process.

Anne and Alexander discovered a productive symbiosis, a complementary set of skills. Anne brings a clear-eyed pragmatism to each Studio 19 undertaking. With a reporter’s incisiveness, she works with Alexander to decipher and define the functional, aesthetic and budgetary requirements of every client. That clarity insures that each custom library, kitchen, closet, wall unit or commissioned table, armoire, étagère or dresser is true reflection of each client’s individual style.