Furnishing our new townhouse in Pueblo Campestre Phase 2, we learned that we couldn’t find everything we wanted at furniture stores. This was especially true when talking about items like an entertainment center wall unit or a small island for the kitchen. With a recommendation from someone in Todos Santos, we explored the Facebook page of Carmat Carpinteria, based in La Paz. The range of work in parota was quite incredible. However, because the carpenter was from La Paz, we were nervous and decided to visit his shop in La Paz. We knew that many custom builders worked out of a small garage or open area. We met Carlos Ochoa at his shop, which turned out to be very large with staff working and quite a few very large projects underway.

The process of working with Carlos was very simple. He visited our townhouse, took measurements. looked at pictures of items that we found online that had the design elements in which we were interested and gave us estimates for the items. The prices were much more reasonable than what we had found from craftsmen in Los Cabos and certainly better than from the retail stores. For example, if we had known Carlos before we ordered our bedroom furniture from Terra Cu, we would have had him build it. He will work in any type of wood, although much of the work that he does is in parota.

When the time came for delivery and installation, Carlos loaded up a trailer and brought a team down. We had him build a wall unit for the whole back wall of our living room, a kitchen island painted to match the lower cabinets in the kitchen and with the quartzite top we had from our counter supplier, a round outdoor table, a bench for our courtyard with a lifting seat for storage, a desk for my office, some barstools and a side table for the upstairs bedroom. Carlos even bilt shelves to fit in our master bedroom closet, matching exactly the style of the closet itself. The workmanship is amazing and the installation was flawless. Carlos even came back to touch up the wall unit and to repaint the island when we found that the builder had not used the exact paint that we asked for in painting our kitchen cabinets.