MICHAEL SLOAN’S FAMILY HAS BEEN BENDING METAL SINCE BEFORE HE was born. His great-grandfather sold John Deere equipment in rural Illinois, his grandfather kept the business going, and his father, Craig, eventually struck out on his own, running a metal fabrication shop for 33 years. Sloan grew up inside that shop, and whatever he absorbed there about how things are made and how they should hold together never left him.
After graduating from the University of Kentucky, Sloan went into homebuilding. He loved the creative side of construction, especially the part where a vision becomes something real and livable. Then 2010 arrived, and the real estate market fell apart. He spent five years in San Francisco trying a different business, but something felt off. When the chance came to move back East and build something alongside his father, he didn’t have to think about it long.
The two sat down and asked themselves an honest question: What could they make that nobody else was making well? Craig Sloan brought a lifetime of metalworking expertise. Michael Sloan brought a builder’s instinct for what people wanted in their homes. He had spent years constructing high-end houses with serious outdoor entertaining spaces, and he kept noticing a gap in the market. Only two companies were making high-quality metal outdoor cabinets, and neither was doing it particularly well. So, the Sloans bought products from those competitors, disassembled them on the shop floor and built prototypes from scratch, improving every detail where they found cheap materials or shortcuts. “Our prototype was built like a tank, could withstand anything, and it was good looking,” Michael Sloan says. “We knew we had something.” John Michael Studio launched in 2016.
By 2020, the company had grown to cover the entire U.S. market and had built a serious reputation in outdoor living. Its metalwork was becoming more creative every year, with new styles, colors and finishes, and its 166,000-square-foot facility in Chester County, South Carolina, was humming along. Then COVID hit, and an unexpected email changed the company’s direction.
Marcus Wainwright, the founder of fashion brand Rag & Bone, had been following John Michael’s work. He reached out to say he was building a new home in Upstate New York and saw an opportunity in the kitchen industry. He told Sloan that nobody was doing high-quality indoor kitchens with the same ambition and materials that John Michael was bringing to the outdoors, and he offered to be the company’s first. It was a generous challenge from someone with real kitchen taste, and Sloan took it seriously. He spent weeks studying metal in interior design, looking at everything he could find across the world. “Metal was nowhere to be found,” he says. “I realized we were about to change the trajectory of our mission.”
The indoor kitchen they built for Wainwright exploded the creative possibilities of their work. Making indoor kitchens opened the door to integrating wood with metal, using high-quality materials, like maple, oak and walnut, for cabinet interiors and countertop blocks. The combination of media was beautiful. Sloan brought the results to the Kitchen & Bath Industry Show (KBIS) in Las Vegas, and on the first day, a ribbon appeared on their booth. John Michael Studio had been nominated for Best of KBIS. The judges encouraged them to keep innovating. They did.
Today, John Michael Studio offers a range of distinct lines. Its Signature Outdoor Kitchens are built from marine-grade 316L stainless steel, with custom weatherproof gasketing and powder coat finishes designed to survive anything the elements can throw at them. And the company’s indoor kitchen line, born from that first collaboration with Wainwright, blends precision metalwork with fine wood selections, creating spaces that are simultaneously built to last a century and genuinely beautiful to live in every day.
The company’s work caught the attention of Middleby Residential, which owns some of the most iconic names in luxury cooking, including La Cornue, AGA, Viking and Lynx. After La Cornue reached out and visited the South Carolina facility, a formal partnership was announced. John Michael Studio is now the official American luxury cabinetry partner for La Cornue U.S.A., designing tailored cabinetry for the CornuFé range line and for the AGA Elise. Every paint color, knob and finish detail is sourced from France to ensure a seamless collaboration.
If you ask Sloan why someone should choose a metal kitchen over a wood one, he’ll give you a straight answer. “A typical wood kitchen will last 15 to 20 years,” he says. “After that, it starts wearing out.” A sink base exposed to water condensation often doesn’t last that long. Metal changes that calculus entirely. A John Michael cabinet can sit outside 365 days a year with no cover, through rain, salt air and summer heat, and come out looking the same. Indoors, the longevity extends across generations. You are not buying a kitchen you will eventually replace. You are buying a kitchen that your children will inherit.
Beyond durability, there is the design argument. Wood kitchens, however beautiful, have been working from a relatively narrow palette for decades. Metal opens the conversation to brass, copper, bronze, hammered finishes, hundreds of powder coat colors, and the kind of textural richness that can make a kitchen feel unique and personal to the home’s inhabitants, rather than selected from a showroom catalog. Frank Lloyd Wright understood this long before the rest of the design world. In several of his most celebrated homes, Wright specified stainless steel for his kitchen cabinetry and surfaces as a deliberate design choice rooted in his belief that a home’s materials should be honest, durable and beautiful in equal measure. John Michael Studio is making the case that the rest of the design world is long overdue to catch up.
None of this happens without what Sloan considers the company’s most important asset: not a material or a finish but a culture. Everything is made in Chester County, where Craig Sloan lives 10 minutes from the factory. The exceptions are the cabinet’s feet, drawer slides, hinges and exterior hardware. Every other element, from bending raw metal to the finishing touches, is handled in-house by a team Michael Sloan is visibly proud of. Each Signature cabinet requires up to 80 individual welds. “Being an American company is super important to us,” he says. “Service is a lost art. Our word has to be everything.”
That philosophy extends to how John Michael Studio selects its retail partners, and nowhere is it more apparent than in South Carolina. Signature Kitchens & Baths serves as the company’s local area partner, one of a carefully chosen group of dealers across the country entrusted to represent John Michael Studio’s private collection lines. The vetting process is deliberately personal. Credentials matter less than character, and the first question Sloan asks of any prospective partner has nothing to do with showroom square footage or sales volume. “Our number one rule is: Do we get along?” he says. “When we met Jim and Linda at Signature Kitchens, we hit it off right away. We have an amazing partnership with them.”
Clients in the Carolinas who want to experience John Michael Studio’s work firsthand can do so at Signature Kitchens, which offers not just a showroom but a relationship with people who understand what went into every weld. For a company built by a father and son who are also best friends, that’s exactly the right place to start. *
Robin Howard is a freelance writer in Charleston. See more of her work at robinhowardwrites.com.
