A Journey West
The story of Santa Fe Stoneworks begins with founder Bill Wirtel.
After earning a degree in economics from the University of Missouri and working for IBM during the late 1960s, Bill realized that the corporate world was not where he belonged.
Bill left his hometown of St. Louis and spent several years traveling throughout the American West before discovering Santa Fe, New Mexico.
He immediately knew he had found his home.
Bill became involved in jewelry and lapidary work, and in 1972 he cut his first stone. The experience awakened a connection to a family tradition he would only fully understand years later. Bill’s grandfather had been a stone cutter from Upper Bohemia, and the Wirtel family name was associated with a historic stoneworkers’ guild mark.
What began as a new creative direction became a continuation of a craft carried through generations.
The Beginning of Santa Fe Stoneworks
Bill eventually met engineer John Iverson, who purchased one of the letter openers Bill was making in his home workshop. John immediately recognized that the process could be applied to many different objects.
Together, Bill and John formed Santa Fe Stoneworks in 1978.
The company’s earliest work applied traditional lapidary techniques to objects outside the conventional jewelry market. The partners experimented with letter openers, gifts and knife handles before becoming increasingly fascinated with cutlery during the early 1980s.
They found their calling in combining the function of a knife with the beauty of natural materials.
As Bill described it, the knife is humanity’s oldest tool and lapidary is one of its oldest crafts. Santa Fe Stoneworks brought those two traditions together in a way that had rarely been seen before.
Art Made to Be Used
Our knives are created to be admired, collected, carried and used.
From approachable everyday pocket knives to limited editions and one-of-a-kind works of art, we believe beauty should never come at the expense of function. Each piece must perform as a dependable tool while expressing the character of the materials and the hands that shaped it.
This balance between art and utility has earned Santa Fe Stoneworks recognition throughout the knife and American craft industries, including multiple honors from BLADE Magazine for innovation and collectible knife design.
A Second-Generation Family Business
Today, Santa Fe Stoneworks continues as a second-generation family business, with Bill’s children, Miles and Anna Wirtel, helping carry the company into its next chapter.
While designs, materials and knife technology continue to evolve, the heart of the company remains unchanged: respect for the material, pride in the craft and the belief that an everyday tool can also be a lasting work of art.
For nearly five decades, Santa Fe Stoneworks has transformed stone, fossil, shell and steel into objects meant to be used, admired and passed from one generation to the next.
If you’re in the area, please feel free to visit us at our gallery located in Santa Fe, New Mexico. The same building is home to both the gallery and our production facilities. Tradition has it that the robin’s-egg-blue windows and doorframes ward off evil.
As you enter the main hallway into the gallery, you will pass a fountain in which water plays over a 300-pound boulder of brilliant blue azurite.
Handcrafted in America Since 1978
To wear the Santa Fe Stoneworks name, each piece has completed a journey of countless painstaking steps. An artistic journey we travel, some think, to perfection.
Made distinctive by nature. Handcrafted, assembled and finished in Santa Fe, New Mexico.
Anna, Bill, & Miles