Friends of mine recently employed a professional declutterer. A WHAT? I hear you cry but yes; some people do earn their living by helping other people declutter their homes. In fact there is a whole industry out there, try googling declutter or try this website – www.apdo-uk.co.uk

My friends are delighted with the service they have received. Apparently, their declutterer helped them to decide what items needed taking to the council tip, which things to keep, how to arrange their free standing furniture to achieve the most decluttered look and what to put away.

It’s the putting away that intrigues me. Assuming that you don’t dispose of all your clothes and possessions, to achieve the objective you need storage space. Modern houses, in particular, are designed to maximise the use of expensive land and meet planning targets on density, therefore, room sizes are getting smaller and the space for storage furniture is at a premium. Creative use of bespoke furniture in difficult spaces is one solution but you will also need to maximise the use of wardrobes. Bedroom furniture with sliding doors may be one solution to achieving the Tardis Effect. The best way to an uncluttered home life is to adopt the minimalist look that is becoming so popular in interior design. Simple flat doors on wardrobes can make a room look bigger, they need less cleaning and, added bonus, cost less. Particularly popular of late are plain  high gloss doors. However, I have recently noticed a trend to plain wooden and satin lacquered doors, to get that uncluttered look simplicity is everything.

But decluttering the bedroom isn’t everything, minimalist living room furniture can create that Zen like air of tranquilty as well, and for those who work from home, an uncluttered office and a neat and tidy workspace are essential aids to productivity.

To Norbury Park off the A24 Mickleham Bypass near Dorking.

Tucked away in the North Downs close to Denbies Vineyard, over a narrow bridge on the River Mole, up a winding single track road that seems to go on for miles lies the Norbury Park Sawmill. Sunday was their open day and I was delighted to discover this wonderful source of hand-made, solid hardwood furniture.

The sawmill and wood workshop are owned by the conversation charity Surrey Wildlife Trust. They specialise in the manufacturing of outdoor signs and furniture suitable for all occasions made from English Timbers using  are sourced from wood traditional joinery techniques.

All their timbers are sourced from woodlands managed to the Forestry Stewardship Council standards (FSC) and from within the South East of England. Their workshop waste is used to heat the workshop, as is done at Options Furniture.

All the profits from the sale of their beautiful hardwood furniture contribute towards the management of the countryside and in addition support associated woodland industries that help to preserve wildlife and traditions for future generations.

I was most impressed by a solid oak bed, although would not want to carry it upstairs, and thought some of their oak tables and chairs

were stunning. As well as the predominance of English oak in their furniture, they use many beautiful native hardwoods such as walnut, elm, yew and sweet chestnut.

We were entertained by their resident musical instrument manufacturer playing Irish and English folk music on a hand-crafted dulcimer and watched a wood turner transforming seemingly plain blocks of wood into delicate and elegant bowls which showed the beauty of burr patterns caused by coppicing and pollarding of trees, where young branches are cut off for craftwork such as hurdle making and basket weaving and to encourage regrowth.

Most of all, it was fascinating to see such self sufficient production creating beautiful craftmanship from the raw material, harvested locally and worked from the first saw cut to the finished piece all on one site.

Sadly, at Options we have to buy in our raw materials but from there through to the final installation in the clients’ homes we do add a lot of value and craft skill under one roof.

I came into the furniture market in 1960 with my first job in a retail furniture shop in east London. Eight years earlier the production of furniture in the UK under the Utility brand ended.

In the middle of World War Two it had become apparent that the combination of a severe lack of timber suitable for furniture making (in which Britain was not self-sufficient) and the increased demand for new furniture due to the losses of housing caused by bombing and to the continuing establishment of new households after marriage, had created a severe furniture shortage.

The Utility Furniture Committee was set up in 1942, drawing on considerable expertise, principally Gordon Russell and Ernest Clench, also Herman Lebus and John Gloag, in order to assure that the scarce available resources were used in a sensible way. New furniture was rationed and was restricted to newly-weds and people who had been bombed out, under the “Domestic Furniture (Control of Manufacture and Supply (No 2)) Order 1942″ operative from 1 November 1942.

The Committee produced a number of approved designs, published in the Utility Furniture Catalogue of 1943. The aim was to ensure the production of strong well-designed furniture making the most efficient use of the scarce timber. The designs were largely in the tradition of the Arts and Crafts movement, and were severe in their simplicity and lack of ornamentation, entirely contrary to popular taste of the immediate pre-war period. Furniture based on these designs was constructed by about 700 firms around the country. Given the huge number of individual manufacturers involved, it is perhaps not surprising that quality varied enormously.

This was long before the establishment of the fitted furniture industry in this country.

The Committee were genuine believers in the aesthetic qualities of their designs. Popular hankering for superfluous ornament however manifested itself immediately, and instances were apparently reported of black market utility furniture with added carvings and decoration. The Committee were reconstituted as the Design Panel in 1943; and in 1946, in conjunction with the important exhibition of post-war design, “Britain Can Make It“, unveiled three new furniture ranges (Cotswold, Chiltern and Cockaigne) intended to carry forward the best of their design ethos into the postwar period. Despite their best efforts to steer public taste, as soon as the war ended the general public reacted against its austerities and the mass market swung towards colourful and extravagant designs. Although the “Diversified” range was announced in 1948, drawing on contemporary Scandinavian designs, the tide of public taste was against it and the Panel was wound down; the Scheme was officially closed in 1952.

The logo of utility furniture was taken from that developed earlier for the Utility clothing scheme: two capital letters C’s and the figure 41, for “Civilian Clothing 1941″ (which soon became known as “The Cheeses”).

In 1960 most of the companies that had been manufacturing Utility Furniture were still in business and included Harris Lebus of Tottenham who owned what was reputed to be the world’s largest furniture factory. This facility was over a mile long and the company published a catalogue the size of a modern paperback that contained thousands of items of furniture. The Lebus catalogue was known in the retail trade as the ‘bible’ and was the first port of call when a customer asked for a specific individual piece of furniture such as a table,  sideboard or wardrobe. Most of Lebus’ production was still based on the old Utility designs and the predominant material was oak. Oak had served the furniture industry well during the war and the years of austerity that followed. We had fairly plentiful supplies of indigenous oak and whatever else was needed was available from the USA in plentiful quantities and at affordable prices. For more discerning client’s walnut was available at a premium price, again from home grown stocks and the plentiful hardwood forests of America.

However, the furniture buying public was looking for something new, something different to what Mum and Dad had during the war and that did not remind them of the old Utility days.

Enter the two major furniture manufacturing companies most prominent in the other important cabinet making area, of the Chiltern Hills around High Wycombe: Ercolani and E. Gomme. Both of these business were founded by Jewish refugees from Europe and neither were tainted by association with the Utility brand.

The connection with the Chilterns was important for Ercolani who had their own plantations of elm and beech the traditional european chair makers’ raw material and their elegant blend of traditional and modern designs  were such a runaway success that there was soon a waiting list of up to 12 months for Ercol furniture.

E. Gomme took a different route;  sourcing exotic teak, now becoming available  from the far east in the burgeoning post war market and using it to create a new trend in stylish modern furniture based on Scandinavian designs; E. Gomme created a brand that became synonymous with contemporary furniture; G Plan.

Yes, I did mean stiles and not styles as in ranges of fitted furniture.

I thought I would go a bit off-piste today and air a personal rant about the changing styles of stiles on our footpaths. My interest in the functionality and practicality of all types of furniture leads me to ask why our stiles are changing and who decides.

Everybody can recognize the traditional, crossover type of style that has served walkers in the British countryside for centuries whilst forming an effective barrier peripatetic livestock. Because the lower and higher steps cross over each other, if you start with your left (or right) foot on the lower step and then place the right (or left) foot on the higher, you then put your left (or right) foot over the fence and onto the higher level, which is now reversed – right/left, and your right (or left) foot forward onto the lower level before stepping down off the stile; always in a forward facing position.  You can watch your dog, if you have one, look out for livestock if you have just entered a field (particularly useful regarding bulls, rams or Billy goats) and continue on your way in a smooth, flowing action.

However, somebody somewhere has overridden the accumulated wisdom of generations past and decreed that new stiles do not cross over but have two steps facing in the direction of the path and side by side. Now you must place your first foot on the lower step, the next on the higher and rotate your body through 180 degrees in order to put the first foot on the higher level and face backwards to your direction of travel whilst drawing your second foot backwards over the fence and placing it behind you on the lower level and stepping down backwards off the stile. You are now looking back along your line of travel, have no view of what is in the field you may just have entered or what lies under the foot you are now depositing on unknown ground. When country walking, I like to see what is on the ground I am about to step on.

To assist this inelegant pirouette some of the new, linear stiles now incorporate a post beside the higher level for you to hold whilst rotating. Thanks for that but please can I have my old fashioned and aesthetically pleasing stiles back?

Who decides these things and why? Who amongst the great walking public is consulted? Was it broke and did it need fixing?

Thanks for letting me get that off my chest, I will try to get back on track with the fitted furniture market soon.

Most customers of the fitted furniture market have a room(s) and a storage requirement(s) coupled with an aeshetic preference and a budget. The job of the fitted furniture designer is to examine the first two issues and produce a design that a adresses the need within the constraints of the latter two.

Occassionaly, the client will have produced the design themselves and simply require that the supplier produces and installs the furniture from the customers choice of materials and within the budget. This sounds simple, but where does the consumer go to find this service?

In the first instance, they need a supplier with the necessary craft skills (carpenter, joiner or cabinet maker)  together with the ability to source the materials and a workshop or production facility to convert those materials into finished products.  The supplier will also need the communication skills to understand the client’s expectations and the drafting expertise and understanding of construction methods that will allow them to convert the aspiration into detailed working drawings to be fed back to the client such as to assure them that the finished product will be what they thought first thought of . Sounds simple, but it aint!

A lifetime in the furniture market, both bespoke and custom-made and observing how often the process can fail, convinces me of the essential need for great care on the consumer’s part when embarking on this path. Firstly, the necessary combination of craft, communication and drafting skills will rarely be found in one person. I can think of a few highly skilled master cabinet makers  who are multi-skilled enough to pull it off but these are highly skilled individuals whose services do not come cheap. Also such super stars of the fitted furniture market can be prima donnas who may find it difficult to subjugate their own design skills to those of their clients who have strong ideas of their own.  If you have a big budget and are willing to place your precious concept in the hands of a master like Mark Wilkinson or John Makepiece you will not be disappointed.

For most people, with more modest budgets, the road is set with pitfalls. Try the major fitted furniture companies like Hammonds or Sharps but expect to be told that ‘this is what we do and we will be pleased to fit our products to your needs and aspirations’. Be prepared to compromise. You could employ a carpenter but insist on precise documentation that guarantees you will get exactly what you wished for or that will empower you to reach a satisfactory conclusion in the event that you don’t. Also, with the carpenter, establish whether he/she has access to a remote production facility that allows your furniture to be manufactured and finished off-site or expect to entertain your tradesman in your home for days or weeks and to live with the disruption and the smell of glues and varnishes for some time after they leave.

There is another route: find a small to medium sized bespoke fitted furniture manufacturer that employs skilled and trained designers with the required communication skills, a draftsman (man or woman), a qualified cabinet maker who knows how to turn a design into a set of manufacturing instructions, a production facility with skilled bench joiners and the capacity to custom-make and finish  individual pieces of furniture that will fit together to form a perfectly fitted installation in your home, and carpenter installers selected for their craft skills and demeanor that will make the short period in your home (usually one or two days per room) a pleasurable experience.

Here are a few furniture installations designed by client’s and interpreted, manufactured and installed by Options Fitted Furniture.