Our Story

Montage Group, Hamilton — Kitchens, Doors & Wardrobes Since 1980

Exceptional design, expert craftsmanship, trusted for over 40 years.

Montage Group is a family-owned joinery business based in Frankton, Hamilton. Today we trade as four specialist brands — Montage Kitchens & Joinery, Montage Doors, Montage Wardrobes and Montage Stairs — but we started as one small joinery shop, and we’re still run by the same family who started it. This is that story.

A run-down factory by the railway line

In 1981, a young Hamilton joiner named Ken Monk entered a partnership with Rusty Woollen and bought a business called Pinecraft Industries, renaming it Waikato Woodware.

The factory, at 37 Killarney Road, sat alongside the railway lines, and it was rough. Rats stole the sandwiches out of the lunchroom.

It wasn’t a glamorous start. But it was the start.

In 1987, Ken and his wife Rowena bought out Rusty’s share of the business.

The New Factory

In 1990, Ken and Rowena bought a double section at 1 Belfast Place, and in 1991 a new joinery factory was built there — the site Montage still operates from today. Rowena was pregnant with their son Michael at the time, and was painting the office ceilings with a long-handled roller, “waddling along” as she went.

Becoming Montage

The factory was extended again in 1995. An old paint spray booth from those early years later made way for what is now the doors and wardrobes workshop area.

It was shortly after this time that Waikato Woodware was renamed “Montage Kitchens & Joinery” — a new name to better reflect what the business had actually become.

A family business, and an industry life

Ken didn’t just build kitchens — he helped shape the industry itself. From 1997, when he was elected President of the Waikato/Bay of Plenty region, through to the national stage, his involvement in New Zealand joinery ran deep:

President of the New Zealand Joinery Manufacturers Federation, 2003–2004
A long-serving member of the JITO board
JITO board chairman at the time JITO merged with BCITO
Trustee of The Joinery Training Trust, to fund joinery training & development
A driving force behind the NZS:4211 compliant timber joinery standard, travelling the country running seminars to build industry awareness of it
Recipient of the Owen Wright Memorial Trophy in 2012, awarded for significant contribution to the joinery industry
An Honorary Life Member of Master Joiners, awarded in 2015, in recognition of his tireless work for the trade

Ken Monk passed away suddenly in September 2017. The Waikato Times remembered him as a man “of faith,” and a master joiner legend whose true measure, as his obituary put it, was in how he treated people who could do him “absolutely no good.” Read his Waikato Times obituary here. You can read more about Ken’s life and legacy on our dedicated page, Ken’s Story.

Keeping the doors open

Ken’s passing changed everything overnight. Rowena was suddenly facing not just the loss of her husband, but the responsibility of carrying on the business he’d built — at a time when grief made even getting through each day a genuine challenge.

Less than a year after Ken died, in a moment Rowena has described simply as hearing it “very clearly,” she made the decision to keep Montage going — not as the easier path, but because she came to see the business as something bigger than the two of them: a way of providing for her own family, and for the families of everyone who worked there.

It wasn’t a smooth sailing. A CNC machine and an edgebander broke down within days of each other in December 2017, mere weeks after Ken’s death. Then came Covid. Through all of it, the team at Montage kept showing up and stepping up — many of them grieving Ken’s loss themselves, while keeping the business running and delivering projects for our clients.

Rowena has been quick to credit the people who carried her through: Barry, whose calm and steady presence anchored the workshop floor through some genuinely difficult years; loyalty from long serving staff members, and advice and support from friends in the industry.

Factory Expansion and new offices

At the end of 2019, Jared (Ken and Rowena’s son) joined the Montage team. Jared had trained and qualified as a builder, and he brought that on-site, hands-on industry knowledge with him, pushing Montage into new territory and a bigger share of commercial work than the business had taken on before.

He also spearheaded the next round of factory expansion: knocking down the building next door and building a new assembly workshop, showroom, and offices from the ground up. That gave the team room to rearrange the original factory and grow it into a genuine two-line operation — two CNC machines, two edgebanders — significantly increasing what Montage could produce.

In 2024, Michael (Ken and Rowena’s other son) came on board too.

Montage created a new interior doors division, backed by the purchase of new machinery built specifically for the job. It was around this time that the business rebranded as Montage Group, with distinct divisions reflecting each of its core areas of focus — the structure Montage still operates under today.

A new generation

Today, Montage is led by Ken and Rowena’s sons, Jared and Michael Monk — the second generation of the family to run the business. Jared serves as Managing Director, and together the brothers have overseen Montage’s growth into the wider Montage Group: specialist brands covering kitchens and joinery, interior doors, wardrobes and stairs, alongside a growing commercial fit-out division that has gone on to produce some of the most technically demanding interior joinery projects in the company’s history.

It’s also exactly the kind of succession Ken spent his working life building toward — a business handed on not to a corporate buyer, but to his own sons, run with the same values and many of the same crew who’ve been there for decades.

What hasn't changed

Through four decades, a generational handover, and the hardest years any family business can face, a few things have stayed exactly the same:

We're still in Frankton, on the site Ken and Rowena built in 1991
We're still family-owned, and still run by people who grew up around the factory floor
We continue to produce high quality joinery with our team of skilled designers and joiners
We're still NKBA members and registered Master Joiners — the same industry bodies Ken spent years helping to shape