Robert (Bob) Brickner-McDonald spent his childhood in Mountainside, New Jersey. From early on he had an innate desire to make things – a log clubhouse, forts, HO scale model buildings of balsa wood and cardboard, mountains of papier-mâché. He was in his third year of a civil engineer major when he took his first art class just for fun and realized a different path. He left the WVU engineering program and started a five-year major in architecture at the University of Houston the next year.

Young, newly married to his wife Lauren, and full-time students, they created a lifestyle based on a frugal mentality along with full-time studies in design and creation. Careers brought them from Houston, to South Carolina, to North Carolina, and then both back to New Jersey with children - 31 years ago - to Mountain Lakes. Bob is an architect by day and artist by night: woodworking, drawings, and later small sculptures from found objects.