Conversation
The first hour. Free, unhurried, in the workshop or at home. We bring a notebook, you bring the photograph, the room sketch, the dimension that has been giving you trouble.
Home · Our craft
The slow, ordinary work that becomes a piece of furniture.
Every commission moves through eight stages. None of them are dramatic. Most of them involve the same maker walking past the same bench, four or five times a day, deciding the wood is not quite ready yet.
Where the bench begins
A first hour, then a quiet two weeks of drawing.
We do not start cutting on the first phone call. The opening conversation is for listening — about the room, the family, the way the existing furniture is failing, the holiday photograph that started the idea. We will ask awkward questions about how the lift door swings.
After that, the studio manager schedules drawings. You receive a sheet showing the piece in elevation, plan and section; the joinery method we propose; a sample block of the wood in the chosen finish; and a fabric or leather swatch. None of these is final. They exist so that you can change your mind before we touch a board.
The eight stages
How six to fourteen weeks are actually spent.
Drawings
Within ten working days you have shop drawings — plan, elevation, joinery detail. We expect at least one round of revisions and have built that into the fee.
Wood & finish samples
A 200 mm offcut of the chosen species, finished in the chosen tone, and the chosen fabric or leather swatch, are sent to you for sign-off. Sometimes the sample wins out, sometimes a darker stain does.
Wood rests
Boards are pulled from the long rack, milled to oversize, and stood up for three weeks — longer in the wet months. We sand a corner each day and feel the grain. Wood that wants to move is sent back to the rack.
Joinery
Mortise-and-tenon, dovetail, bridle, lap. Cut with hand tools where the eye matters most, with machinery where the wood is happiest with a clean reference. Dry-fitted, then taken apart and dry-fitted again.
Upholstery
Frames are webbed and sprung in our small back room. We tie eight-way coils where the seat earns it, and use cold-foam-and-feather combinations elsewhere. Buttoning, channelling, piping — all decided in the drawing stage, not at the last minute.
Finishing
Two coats of hardwax oil, water-based sealer, or matt lacquer — whichever the piece wants. Sanded back between coats. The piece is then left under our roof for at least a week so the finish settles.
Delivery
Our own crew loads the piece, blanket-wraps it, drives it to your door, and levels it in your room. They will show you which cloth to wipe it with and which one to put down.
A few details we are picky about
The quiet stuff that makes a piece last.
a.
Sliding-dovetail shelves
Shelves and dividers slide into a tapered dovetail rather than sitting on shelf pins. They never sag, they never need re-pinning.
b.
Breadboard ends, glued correctly
Tabletops have breadboard ends pegged in the middle and floated at the ends — so the top can move with the season and not split.
c.
Eight-way coil seats
Where a seat lives, hand-tied coils. We use sinuous spring only where weight does not warrant the extra hour.
d.
Felt-faced feet
Every leg has felt or leather faced into the foot so that your floor is not scribed the moment a chair scoots back.
e.
Quiet brass hardware
Where hardware shows, it is brushed brass or oxidised brass, chosen and aged in-house so that nothing looks store-bought.
f.
A maker’s initials
Every piece carries the initials of the maker, branded into a hidden surface — the back of a drawer, the underside of a rail.
Start a conversation
Bring a photograph and a room. We will bring the questions.
If you would like to see how the bench works in person, the workshop is open to clients by appointment. Most first visits last an hour and end with us drawing on the back of an envelope.