Our Story
HANDCRAFTED IN LOS ANGELES
From a want-ad to a welding torch.
How a kid from West Hills ended up making steel agaves for a living.
The Start
I'm Alexander Archondakis. I grew up in West Hills, California, making things.
Guitar at eight. Songs not long after. Storyboards drawn on printer paper pulled from my mom's home office, shot frame by frame on the flip video camera I got for my tenth birthday. Action-figure movies with hand-written dialogue. Most of my elementary and middle school years looked like that — an ongoing, low-budget studio operating out of my bedroom.
In high school I put the drawing down and picked up a bass. I played in bands all through high school and for a few years after, trying to make something of it.
The Turn
Around twenty, I'd dropped out of Moorpark College and was looking for work. I answered a want-ad — somebody needed a helper for their art store. I called. They called back. I drove over to a house where metal sculptures were being built by hand.
The guy who hired me taught me how to cut sheet metal and weld the pieces together. I fell in love with the process almost immediately. A year in, I started making my own designs on the side.
The Work
I've been going to Joshua Tree my whole life. My dad lives out there. The agaves, yuccas, and Joshua trees shaped everything about how I see landscape — spiky, architectural, stubborn, alive. When I started designing my own pieces, that's what kept coming out of the torch.
I posted the first ones online. People bought them. I made more. At some point the side project got bigger than the day job, and I went full-time for myself.
Axel Decor has been running since 2020. Every piece is cut, welded, and finished by hand in my Los Angeles studio. Made to order, one at a time, for people who want real sculpture outside their home instead of something mass-produced.
I remember the first agave I ever shipped to a customer. Both of my parents have been entrepreneurs their whole lives and I'd never thought I could do the same thing. Then that order came in. It's still the reason I do this.
— Alexander
FROM US, FOR YOU
Quality Promise
Every Axel Decor piece is made from heavy-gauge steel and finished to live outside — sun, rain, salt air. Patina will deepen and shift over the years. That's the point. Structurally, these pieces are built to last decades.
If something ever doesn't hold up the way it should, get in touch. I'll make it right — a repair, a replacement, or something we figure out together.