The Garage, the Buttons, and the Beginning of Everything

There is a story Kishan Gooneratne tells about his father that never gets old. It is not about the first major commission, or the first export order, or even the first time someone called the company by the name Mahogany Masterpieces. It is about buttons.

Barrel-shaped. Wooden. For a shop on Galle Road called Barefoot. That was 1974. Sumith Gooneratne had left his previous life, gathered a small group of brothers and craftsmen, and set up in what was, by any measure, a modest beginning - a garage, a workbench, a belief that things made from timber, made properly, were worth making at all. The Barefoot order was not glamorous. But it was a start. And from that start, everything followed.

"He never talked about building a business. He talked about building things that deserved to last." - Kishan Gooneratne

The Conviction Behind the Craft
What has always defined Mahogany Masterpieces is a passion for timber - for its grain, its weight, its warmth, and its honesty as a material. From the earliest days, the people who built this company were drawn to wood not because it was convenient or commercial, but because they loved it. They loved what it could become in the right hands, and they loved that something made from it properly could outlast almost everything else a person might own.

That passion has always expressed itself most clearly in a commitment to solid wood - to working with the real thing, not its substitutes. In 2012, we formalised that commitment across our entire range: 100% solid wood, without exception. No particle board. No MDF. No veneer. Every piece, from the most modest occasional table to the grandest dining set, built entirely from solid timber. Not because it was the easiest path, but because it was the only one consistent with why we got into this work in the first place.

A Company Takes Shape
Through the late 1970s and into the 1980s, Craft Supplies - as the company was originally known - grew steadily. Not dramatically, but with the quiet accumulation of reputation that comes from making things people trust. Word moved through Colombo's architectural and design community. Commissions became more significant. The team grew. The workshop expanded. By 1980, the company had made its first export. It was a milestone that would eventually grow into a presence across sixteen countries - but at the time, it was simply the next logical step for a company whose work had outgrown the island that had made it.The name Mahogany Masterpieces came later. It was always implicit in the work - in the weight of every piece, the depth of every finish, the way a dining table from the Boralesgamuwa atelier looked ten years after delivery and then twenty and then thirty. The name simply made explicit what the furniture had always been saying.

The First Craftsman
Central to the story of Mahogany Masterpieces is a figure who rarely takes centre stage in the telling of it: Anil Gooneratne, Sumith's youngest brother, and the company's first craftsman. It was Anil who established the manufacturing processes and quality standards that MM follows to this day. His knowledge of Sri Lankan timber - its character, its quirks, its potential - is unparalleled. Much of what a Mahogany Masterpieces piece is, is a result of what Anil understood about what the wood could be.That tradition of craft knowledge passed between people, not just written in manuals, is one of the things that makes MM genuinely difficult to replicate. You can buy mahogany. You cannot buy fifty years of understanding it.

What Fifty Years Means
In 2024, Mahogany Masterpieces turned fifty. The workshop now covers more than fifty thousand square feet. The team includes craftsmen who have spent their entire working lives in it. The company exports to sixteen countries. The defect rate across everything manufactured is less than one percent. No MM piece has ever reported an insect or rot defect in fourteen years of records.But what fifty years actually means is simpler than any of those numbers. It means that somewhere in Colombo right now, there is a dining table that Sumith's team made in 1985, still in daily use, still carrying the grain that was chosen by hand for it. The barrel shaped buttons for Barefoot were not a beginning, exactly - they were a proof of concept. They proved that things made properly are worth making at all.The rest, as they say, followed.