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. I built skate ramps in the driveway. I took apart the family microwave. I was the kid who'd disappear into the garage for a Saturday and come out with something — usually with a small cut on a thumb.
I wasn't an art kid in the school-art sense. I didn't draw well. I didn't paint. What I did was make. The medium changed; the impulse didn't.
The Turn
Around twenty, I'd dropped out of Moorpark College and was looking for work. I'd been bouncing between line cook, sound engineer's assistant, and a forgettable retail job. Nothing stuck.
I answered a want-ad — somebody needed a helper for their art store. I drove over to a house in the Valley where metal sculptures were being built by hand. The guy who hired me opened his garage and there was a forge, an anvil, a plasma cutter, and two half-finished steel agaves leaning against a workbench.
He taught me how to cut sheet metal and weld the pieces together. Within three weeks I was making my own cuts. Within six months I was finishing pieces start-to-finish.
I fell in love with the process almost immediately. The material was honest. You couldn't fake your way through a weld.
The Desert
I've been going to Joshua Tree my whole life. My parents used to drive my brother and me out for long weekends — we'd hike, get sunburned, eat pancakes at the same diner every Sunday morning. I never lost the habit.
The agaves, yuccas, and Joshua trees shaped everything about how I see landscape. Spiky, architectural, stubborn, alive. Plants that don't apologize for taking up space. When I started designing my own pieces, that's what kept coming out of the torch.
I'd drive home from Joshua Tree on a Sunday night, sketch all week, cut on Saturday, weld on Sunday. That was the rhythm for almost two years before I sold a single piece.
The Studio
Axel Decor has been running since 2020. The studio is in Los Angeles, in a former auto-body shop with thirty-foot ceilings and one very loud roll-up door.
Every piece is cut, welded, and finished by hand. No factory, no outsourcing, no second hands on the welds. When you order a sculpture, I'm the one who makes it.
The work goes to private gardens, hotels, courtyards, design firms, and the occasional film set. There are pieces in twelve states. There's one in Singapore that I'm fairly proud of. Most of all, the work goes to people who'd rather have one good thing they can keep than ten of something disposable.
What I Promise
Three things, plainly:
- It will last. Built from heavy-gauge steel and finished for the outdoors. Sun, rain, salt air. Decades.
- It will be made for you. Built after you order it, in my LA studio. No warehouse copies.
- If something's wrong, I'll fix it. Get in touch. I'll make it right — a repair, a replacement, or something we figure out together.
That's the work.
— Alexander Archondakis
Founder · Axel Decor · Los Angeles