You can reach Fred by telephone: 403.286.4330

At first, all we knew was that Fred Coates' big hands had been planing wood and making wonderful furniture and art. We wanted to find out more. To contact him we hopped online and, in short order, found some other guys website that was not "his". And we got a list of other Fred Coates internet sites, none of which were about him. So even though we knew that he was an extremely successful, well-respected, broadly-known woodworker he didnt have a website.

But before we built this website for him, back then living in a small town, living in a time when nobody'd ever heard the term "internet," information was difficult to come across. This had the effect of making Fred Coates furniture seem like a private treasure collectively owned by us and our friends, and finding information on Coates seemed to us like researching some lost antique civilization. As we worked at it, our picture of Coates gradually got more and more fleshed out: the guy at the record store two towns over knew about Fred Coates, so we found out what records he bought, and, after we special-ordered and bought those (each of us owning a different album and taping it for the others) we began to see how he built the type of furniture and art that he did.

Fred had, seeming spontaneously, invented this new style of pawnshop cabaret joinery that had totally changed the way we put boxes together. We heard for the first time in Fred Coates the aesthetic of junk and wood, the freedom of following your inner voice, the exhilaration of creating and populating your own world. Later, when we went to college, we found out that Fred Coates was famous, and that he had whole pages devoted to him in library books. Even all of the things that had changed my life and seemed magical about his work was accepted matter-of-factly and with a ho-hum jadedness by our classmates who'd grown up in cities, who'd followed Fred Coates as preteens, who were cooler than me. But we're glad we discovered Fred Coates before the world became so well-lit and well-known to us, back when we were still dumb enough to confuse woodwork and magic.

Now he has this web page fredcoates.net fredcoates.ca. We dedicate it to you with handsome love from your fans.