Article by Bronwyn Boyer/ Photographs by Andy Zeltkahns

In Huntsville, there lives the legend of “The Muskoka Chuck Norris." The title belongs, without contest, to Rudi Stade. His name conjures the image of a Nordic “He-Man” who wears shorts in the dead of winter and hauls hundred-pound boulders through the woods. But more than that, he’s an artisan, forging furniture and chessboards from ancient stone with nothing but muscle, mindfulness and a pinch of stubborn joy.

Born in Montreal, Stade’s path was carved by adventure. As a young man, he hitchhiked across the country, learning how to survive – and how to connect. “It helped me overcome my shyness,” he recalls. “You meet all kinds of people when you’ve got your thumb out.”

Those early years etched into him a love for challenge and nature, the two forces that now define him. Working as a contractor in British Columbia each summer gave him an understanding of carpentry, which he took to with ease.

He settled in Toronto for a while, where he became a husband and father. While he continued doing renovation work during this chapter, he also framed large prints in a photo lab. There he befriended well-known photographers and developed (pun intended) a taste for more creative pursuits.

But one day fate intervened, he found himself selling his home and moving his family to Muskoka in 2003. After a weekend escape from the concrete jungle, the effect of the clean air and lake water was hard to shake.

Being in Muskoka rekindled Stade’s child-hood fascination with rocks. “When I was a kid I loved reading about the different types of minerals,” he recalls. “My favourite spot on the school yard was where there was a really round boulder, a couple rocks the size of skulls and a really interesting pebble. We put the pebble on the big rock and dropped the larger rocks on top of it to crack it in half. We brought magnifying glasses from science room to observe the crystals. They were gorgeous – completely clean and sparkling in the sunlight. It was very exciting.”

At first, Stade was reluctant to leave his carefully cultivated business connections and friendships in Toronto behind. But when he saw those perfectly shaped rocks on his forest hikes, carpentry and creativity were united. He founded his new company, Rudinian Rockworks, and dove headfirst into a new life shaped by granite and grit.

For Stade, stone isn’t just a medium – it’s a collaborator. “The rocks tell me what they want to be,” he says. He doesn’t force them into submission but sees how their potential can be achieved with minimal intervention. A bench here, a table there. Each creation holds the spirit of its environment and a history millions of years old.

“When I make furniture from these rocks, I’m reminded how ancient they are,” he explains. “There’s a kind of awe in that.”

The first spark of inspiration for Stade was one stone in particular. “I still have it, actually,” he says. “I made it into a TV table. It’s about 14 inches wide, maybe 16 at the most, and about 35 inches long. It was quite thick. When I lifted it up, the bottom half of it fell away. It turned out that it was already split into two almost-equal sizes. I split the thicker one and I split it into two thin ones and carried both of them out of the forest. The first one weighed 125 pounds. That was tough enough to do but the thicker one was 145 pounds.”

The larger one was used to make a bench. “It took a while to find a matching seat for it,” Stade recalls. “It was the same length, sort of rectangular. That was my second bench. Before that, I found a stone that was almost rectangular, but it was way wider on one side and narrower on the other side. I found another piece that was almost a perfect rectangle. It was a seat to go with the backrest. The wider one was the backrest, and the narrower one would be the seat. Then the backrest would sit in the notch that I cut into the two back legs that were quite a bit longer, about 36 inches or so. I had plenty of room to support the backrest as it leaned back against those bars. It just worked out. It was my first bench, so I don’t think I’ll ever sell it.”

From there, Stade began hauling stone after stone out of the woods, designing around their natural forms. His benches look as though they grew from the ground – organic, raw, unpretentious. “Each one was an exercise in overcoming my impatience,” Stade says. “Grinding at a rock until it fits exactly the way I want – that’s where the art is.”

The life experiences that gave Stade the strength his art requires could be written into a book of wilderness fables. A lucid memory of nearly drowning in a fast river with a survival pack tied around his chest, gave him a taste for adrenaline. He credits that craving for his ability to pull 160-pound rocks out of the woods while being devoured by mosquitoes.

“I felt something had changed in me after that experience,” he says. “I think I became a man in that moment, and ever since I’ve wanted to push my limits.”

But there is also a more practical method behind the myth. Stade’s stone furniture is wildly inventive – constructing custom sleeve anchors to affix stone to wood, chiseling 45-degree angles into 600-pound slabs, and drilling blind with surgical precision, are intuitive techniques that are completely his own.

“It’s just like wood,” he says, “but harder.” Stade uses metal hardware to attach granite slabs to each other, or to multi-branch tree stands. His understanding of the mechanics behind this comes from a combination of construction experience, intuition, and experimentation.

“I’d sneak a hatchet into the stone and give the rock a few whacks,” recalls Stade. “If it didn’t fall apart, I figured it was good to go.”

While Stade’s pieces are sculptural and timeless, they’re also deeply utilitarian. His benches grace public parks and private patios and his stone chessboards provide a perfect way to pass the time.

Stade’s adornment of River Mill Park creates the effect of being in an ancient mythical fairytale; a place where giants and kings assemble to discuss political strategies as they play chess.

One of his proudest works is a table and bench installation for The Table Food Bank. This was a collaboration with late artist Brenda Wainman Goulet, featuring her bronze statue of a man offering food to passersby. Stade’s stone table presents the figure and adds warmth and dignity, a gesture of shared humanity made permanent.

What sets Stade’s pieces apart are the rocks themselves – different colors, textures, and weights, each selected and placed with intention. “You can’t mass-produce this kind of thing,” he says. “It’s always one of a kind.”

Stone is unforgiving, and there is no mortar or glue used in his pieces. One misstep and a priceless slab can be ruined. Stade drills slowly, deliberately, often testing vibrations with his bare hands. If the drill begins to chatter, he knows he's close to a breakthrough and adjusts accordingly.

“Sometimes it takes fifty tries to get it right,” he admits. “But I don’t give up. The rock teaches me to treat it with patience and respect.”

In one particularly difficult piece, a triple-angled backrest for a square bench, Stade spent hours adjusting cuts to get the geometry just right. The result? A seamless joint, held together with the stainless-steel hardware method he developed.

“It’s all about engineering,” he explains. “You can make the impossible work if you understand the physics.”

Understanding the physics seems to be something Stade can channel from the ether, as it’s not something he studied at school. Books are good references but it takes an extraordinary mind to be able to apply diagrams to massive stone slabs that could crush a person in an instant. 

Stade’s ingenuity is demonstrated in the chessboards he made for River Mill Park and Deerhurst Resort. With the right tools and some common sense, he made it happen.

“First, I cut the square,” he says. “Then I made 16-inch-long parallel cuts. The standard chessboard is 16 by 16 inches, with each square being two by two inches. So, I cut each one for the eight columns and then cut it perpendicular, making eight squares. And I chiselled out every second square very carefully to avoid breaking the intact pieces that were part of the original stone surface.”

Once Stade chiselled and drilled those out, he cut squares out of a darker stone he found in the woods that had gold Pyrex on the surface. There were enough of those to make 16 squares, which he cut down to two inches, minus about one eighth of an inch to account for the size of the saw blade.

“I made them the exact same size as the remaining squares so that they would line up on both sides,” he continues. “Then I just put a whole lot of glue into it. I used a super strong PL Premium glue and pushed the stone tiles into place. But because the glue was so thick, it was expanding as it hardened, so I had to go back every few hours and push the stones down again. I did this by whacking them gently with a rubber mallet until they were flush with the original surface. I had to be very careful about it, or the squares would break, and I’d have to drill them out and start over again.”

Stade likes knowing that his work will outlive him. “These pieces will still be here long after I’m gone,” he says. “You can’t say that about a lot of things.”

Despite the longevity and resilience of benches that weigh over a ton, Stade’s construction design allows them to be more portable than one would think. The lack of mortar or glue allows them to be disassembled for relocation. Once, an attempt was made to move a bench in one piece, and it collapsed under the strain, demonstrating why this method is not recommended. Stade repaired it, no hard feelings, only care. “It’s like they’re my kids,” he says fondly. “I want them to be okay out there.”

In spite of the toll this work has taken on his body, Stade isn’t slowing down yet. He hopes to continue taking on new clients and custom pieces and projects. Each new installation is an opportunity to refine his technique. But he also admits that even Chuck Norris is not immortal.

“I’m getting too old for this,” he says with a chuckle. “Maybe I’ll retire at 80, make a rocking chair and then just live in it. That’s not really my style, though.”

Stade has endless ideas for new creations. And even though he has been sourcing his stones from a granite quarry instead of the woods, that magic hasn’t left them. This magic is honoured by bringing them into human spaces. Sitting on a bench, elbowing up to a bar, or admiring the artistic designs in a patio or walkway, one can’t help but feel the secret ancient history they hold.

In a world rushing toward the digital and the disposable, Rudi Stade stands grounded –literally and philosophically. He lifts from the land, crafts with the soul and returns beauty to the world in its most elemental form. And in every curve of granite and grain of ancient stone, there is a whisper of his story, embedded in time.