Mark Anthony Romero

Founder & Solid Walnut Furniture Designer, Modena Mobilia

From Real Estate to Furniture

I’ve spent twenty years in real estate, working primarily with investors. My job was simple to describe and considerably harder to do well: find the property, figure out what it could become, redesign it, remodel it, and sell it for top dollar.

That meant making hundreds of decisions about architecture, materials, proportion, finishes, lighting, and furniture. Somewhere along the way — probably around the tenth time I stood in a house arguing with myself over a sofa — furniture stopped being another line item in the project and became the part I cared about most.

I didn’t call myself a furniture designer then, but I was already developing the instincts that eventually led me to become one.

A Craftsman in Cartagena

My real education in furniture didn’t begin in a showroom. It began in Cartagena, Colombia, about twenty years ago.

I was building a place there and, by the time construction was finished, I had run out of money before I could furnish it. I had expensive taste and, at that particular moment, a decidedly inexpensive budget.

So I tore some pages out of a furniture catalog I liked, drove out to a nearby village, and found a craftsman who said he could make what I wanted. I wasn’t about to furnish an entire house on a promise, so I asked him to build one piece first.

It met my standard. What surprised me almost as much as the quality was the price: roughly a tenth of what I would have paid for the version that inspired it.

I didn’t know it at the time, but I had stumbled onto the basic idea behind Modena Mobilia years before there was a company: put the money into the furniture itself and eliminate as much of the traditional wholesale, showroom, and retail markup as possible.

Why Modena Mobilia Exists

Years later, that lesson came back to me while I was furnishing one of my remodeled properties. I priced two chairs similar to pieces I’d previously had made for under $2,000 total. The quote came back at nearly $5,500 before shipping.

I immediately thought about Cartagena — and started asking what, exactly, the customer was paying for.

There are legitimate costs involved in designing, producing, transporting, marketing, and selling quality furniture. But traditional furniture retail can also place multiple layers between production and the person who ultimately puts the piece in a home. I became convinced there was a better way to do it.

That’s why I founded Modena Mobilia.

Our model is manufacturer-direct and made to order. Instead of buying finished furniture through a conventional wholesale chain and adding another layer of retail markup, Modena Mobilia is involved from design through production. My role includes proportions, dimensions, walnut selection, upholstery, finishes, construction details, and modifications.

My real-estate background still influences that process. I tend to think about furniture in relation to the room around it — scale, sightlines, materials, architecture, and how a piece will actually be lived with — rather than as an isolated object in a catalog photograph.

I also personally inspect every completed Modena Mobilia piece before it ships. A beautiful photograph can sell almost anything online. The real test is what arrives at the customer’s house.

The objective isn’t to make inexpensive furniture. It’s to make exceptional solid walnut furniture without the pricing structure traditionally associated with luxury furniture.

Those are two very different things.

Challenging Conventional Wisdom

I’ve always been skeptical of doing something a particular way simply because that’s how an industry has always done it.

In March 2016, I wrote a piece for The Daily Breeze titled “Sellers: Don’t Negotiate Against Yourself.” At the time, conventional wisdom in a hot real-estate market was that sellers should list as high as possible. I argued that competition among buyers — not an ambitious asking price — ultimately determines what a property is worth.

To make the point impossible to ignore, I listed one of my own properties for one dollar. Obviously, I wasn’t offering to sell the house for a dollar. It was an intentionally exaggerated demonstration that the market would establish the property’s value and that attracting more buyers could produce a better result than trying to dictate the value through the asking price.

That experience reinforced something I’ve believed throughout my career: when an industry tells you “that’s just how it’s done,” it’s worth asking why.

Modena Mobilia came from asking that same question about luxury furniture.

Create Your Furniture

One advantage of producing furniture to order is that our clients don’t have to be limited to whatever happens to be sitting in a warehouse.

Through Create Your Furniture, clients can participate in decisions about their furniture. Depending on the piece, that can include dimensions, fabrics, finishes, and other design details. Clients who want to be more involved can even see their furniture at different stages of production.

That direct connection between design, production, and the customer is an important part of what Modena Mobilia was built to do. You’re not simply picking a SKU from a warehouse. Your furniture is being made for you.

Education & Business Philosophy

I hold two undergraduate degrees from the University of New Mexico, including a B.A. in Political Science and a degree in business, as well as an MBA in International Business from Pepperdine University.

The MBA shows up most clearly in how I run Modena Mobilia. Business school can make simple ideas sound remarkably complicated, but one principle has always stuck with me: find a genuine unmet need and build something that solves it.

The unmet need I saw in furniture was straightforward. People shouldn’t have to choose between quality and price when they’re buying something intended to remain in their home for decades.

So instead of trying to make cheap furniture look expensive, Modena Mobilia takes the opposite approach: start with real materials, focus on design and construction, produce furniture to order, and remove unnecessary layers between production and the customer.

Why I write about
the furniture industry

I write about solid walnut furniture, solid-wood construction, furniture design, custom furniture, sourcing and production, furniture pricing, veneers, materials, and what consumers should examine before spending thousands of dollars on a piece of furniture because I’ve seen the business from the design, sourcing, and production side — not only from the retail side.

I’ve seen how dramatically the price of a piece can change between production and the person buying it. I’ve also seen how difficult it can be for consumers to distinguish solid wood from veneer, meaningful construction differences from marketing language, and genuine value from a perpetual “sale.”

Those are the subjects I write about because they’re the same questions I had when I started looking more closely at the furniture industry myself.

Modena Mobilia grew out of what I found.

Areas of Expertise

My work and writing focus on solid walnut furniture, furniture design, solid-wood furniture construction, custom furniture, furniture sourcing and production, furniture pricing and value analysis, and residential interiors.

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