I’m Nicole Li. I make things — out of wood, out of salvage, out of circuit boards and filament and code.
The path here was not a straight one. I studied pre-architecture in Denmark in 2002, biological engineering at Maryland in 2004, taught in Japan in 2006 and 2007, and went to Finland in 2008 for wood architecture, where a studio I was in designed an ice cream kiosk and then actually built it, one to one, out of spruce.
Melatova came after that. It was a shop name in 2010, back when the work was mostly furniture: benches from single slabs of live-edge cherry, speakers turned from baltic birch, a table built entirely out of VHS tapes. Those sold to people I never met and I have no idea where they live now.
The materials have changed since. These days there is more 3D printing, more embedded firmware, more sensors and NeoPixels and small devices that pay attention to the room they’re in.
What has not changed is the instinct: find out what a material wants to do, then build the thing. In 2005 I drew a concept for an indoor drip irrigation system — a green interior that waters itself, valve and timer worked out in watercolour. In 2026 I built it, with a piezo atomizer and a microcontroller. Twenty-one years is a long time to sit on an idea. I don’t think I ever really put it down.
That is what this archive is for. Some of it sold years ago, some of it was a school project, some of it is still on the bench. It goes back to 2002 and it grows as I make things.
A few things that don’t show up in photographs. I have run a specialty consumer products company since 2012 — about 150 original products taken from idea to shelf, seventeen people on the payroll at its largest, and SOPs written to cGMP guidelines that passed an unannounced FDA inspection with commendation. When the rules changed, I rebranded rather than fight them. Before that I ran QA and coordinated studies at a cell culture lab, and spent a year running a manual mill and lathe in a gunsmith’s shop. More recently: CNM Ingenuity’s IoT Deep Dive, and an IPC J-Standard soldering certification, both in 2026.
I work in Los Ranchos de Albuquerque, New Mexico.
If you have something you’d like made, or you just want to ask about a piece — melatova@gmail.com