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.

Trends in wood veneers for use in furniture come and go. Since 1960 we have had: sapele, teak, elm, ash, maple, yew, cherry and wenge but now is the age of walnut.

The common walnut and the black walnut and its allies, are important for their attractive timber, which is hard, dense, tight-grained and polishes to a very smooth finish. The colour ranges from creamy white in the sapwood to a dark chocolate colour in the heartwood. When kiln-dried, walnut wood tends toward a dull brown colour, but when air-dried can become a rich purplish-brown. Because of its colour, hardness and grain it is a prized furniture and carving wood. Walnut burls (or ‘burrs’ in Europe) are commonly used to create bowls and other turned pieces. Veneer sliced from walnut burl is one of the most valuable and highly prized by cabinet makers and prestige car manufacturers. Walnut wood has been the timber of choice for gun makers for centuries, including the Gewehr 98 and Lee Enfield rifles of the First World War. It remains one the most popular choices for rifle and shotgun stocks, and is generally considered to be the premium – as well as the most traditional – wood for gun stocks, due to its resilience to compression along the grain. Walnut is also used in lutherie, i.e. making stringed musical instruments. The wood of the Butternut and related Asian species is of much lower value, softer, coarser, less strong and heavy, and paler in colour.

In some areas of the US black walnut is the most valuable commercial timber species. In Europe, various EU-led scientific programs have studied walnut growing for timber.

Although often associated with antique furniture of the 17th and 18th centuries and laterly in Art Nouveau and Art Deco, the rich colour and grain of this beautiful wood works wonderfully well with today’s uncluttered, minimalist designs where the natural elegance of the grain needs no further embellishment.

When the Utility furniture scheme was abolished in 1952 and as we emerged from post war austerity, furniture makers looked around for new cabinet making woods to tempt a new generation of home owners with.

An early entrant was sapele, an African hardwood closely resembling mahogany. A new trend in interior design, contemporary, proved very popular with the post war generation, anxious to move on from the heavy and fussy oak and walnut bedroom and dining room suites of their parents. Much contemporary furniture began to be finished with sapele veneer, often complemented with black detail on the legs of dressing tables and living room furniture and sometimes black glass for shelves.

Very little furniture of the time was made from solid wood, chipboard was yet to arrive, so the constructural substrates were principally blockboard and plywood. Precious European hardwoods and expensively imported African timbers were valued for their beauty but were  far too valuable to be used for construction; so the ancient cabinet making craft if veneering became predominant.

‘Veneer is obtained either by “peeling” the trunk of a tree or by slicing large rectangular blocks of wood known as flitches. The appearance of the grainfigure in wood comes from slicing through the growth rings of a tree and depends upon the angle at which the wood is sliced. There are three main types of veneer-making equipment used commercially: and

• A rotary lathe in which the wood is turned against a very sharp blade and peeled off in one continuous or semi-continuous roll. Rotary-cut veneer is mainly used for plywood, as the appearance is not desirable because the veneer is cut concentric to the growth rings.
• A slicing machine in which the flitch or piece of log is raised and lowered against the blade and slices of the log are made. This yields veneer which looks like sawn pieces of wood, cut across the growth rings.
• A half-round lathe in which the log or piece of log can be turned and moved in such a way to expose the most interesting parts of the grain.

Each slicing processes gives a very distinctive type of grain, depending upon the tree species. In any of the veneer slicing methods, when the veneer is sliced, a distortion of the grain occurs. As it hits the wood, the knife blade creates a “loose” side where the cells have been opened up by the blade, and a “tight” side.

Traditionally, veneers were also sawn, but this is more wasteful of wood. Veneering is an ancient art, dating back to the ancient Egyptians who used veneers on their furniture and sarcophagi.’ (Wikipedia)

Veneering overcomes the tendency of solid hardwoods to expand, contract and distort, particularly in centrally heated environments, it reduces costs as decorative hardwoods become ever more expensive and environmentaly helpful in conserving  stocks of diminishing resources.

Meanwhile the Scandinavians were developing their own ideas in modern furniture design and teak was about to take the furniture market by storm.

I love the fact that when I open the solid oak front door of my ordinary 1930s house, I see a pine panelled staircase with an oak handrail, original pine interior doors (not stripped pine, they never were painted) and the pitch pine close boarded floor. The original wooden detail was a major factor in our choice of thes house 25 years ago.

I wish that most of my posessions were made from real wood; not my mobile phone or my car of course, although those half-timbered Morris Minors from the 50s are rather sweet.

Wouldn’t I love to furnish my house with with real wood furniture thoughout, but unfortunately, it is largely beyond my means.  However, I do enjoy designing real wood fitted furniture for Options’ clients and delight in seeing some of it in situ.

These photographs are just a small selection from some recent photo shoots and will soon contribute to extra pages in our photo gallery. They include wardrobes with solid walnut framed Edenbridge doors, a study with a sumtpuous walnut veneered desk that makes the most of this beautiful grain and incorporates an unusual range of walnut veneered doored cupboards and white laquered bookshelves and my f avourite, a stunning range of oak veneered bedroom furniture, with veneered interiors, bow fronted wardrobe doors and drawers, bow topped pass doors and door linings and, best of all, the detail on the doors and drawer fronts is of inset panels of pippy oak veneer.

Don’t ask the price but these three clients certainly feel that they have got real value for money. This is cabinet making of the highest order and this furniture will fulfill the adage the ‘a thing of beauty is a joy forever’.

If you are in the market for some craftsman built, bespoke, real wood furniture take a look at what options has to offer or talk to an options designer.

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.

Read the rest of this entry »

My wife and I recently ordered new bedroom curtains. Not for our house but for our beloved campervan. I say bedroom, and it does have what is known in campervan circles as a rock and roll bed (don’t ask), and a , sort of, rudimentary fitted wardrobe.

Anyway, we ordered the curtains from a small, home based business, hundreds of miles away, that specializes in bespoke curtains and loose covers for campervans. This is an excellent example of a niche market business that appears to be flourishing but would have struggled to find enough clients prior to the advent of the Internet. They are called Camper Comforts.

y wife, cautious lady that she is, was impressed by the massive range of fabrics on their simple, but very functional, website but refused to buy a pig-in-a-poke and insisted that we see some of Camper Comforts work and, if possible talk to one of their clients. I phoned the proprietor, Mel, who turned out to be a paragon of customer service, and she put me in touch with another VW fan living less than 10 miles from us. A visit was arranged, VW van fan lady was charmingly accomodating and we were duly impressed with the workmanship and service.

Fabric selected we sent off our old curtains as templates and they were returned with the new ones exactly within the promised time frame.The following weekend, Easter, in great excitement, we unpacked our new soft furnishings and proceeded to instal them in our travelling boudoir.

They looked great but, bitter blow, one of a matched pair of drapes had small perforation flaws in the fabric. I sent Mel an email and packed the faulty items to return by post immediately. This may have been a frustrating disappointment at the time but it was, for Camper Comforts, an opportunity to shine, and they did.

Mel confirmed receipt of my parcel on the Tuesday and on Thursday, a pristine new pair of curtains arrived by recorded delivery.

I may buy from Camper Comforts again and I may recommend them to a friend, or any one of the many fellow VW fans we meet on our travels. I always say that you get a free anorak with a VW camper and my wife mocks me mercilessly, but when chatting to campsite neighbours who share your passion you cannot help but laud the finer points of your own VW and pass on contacts and sources.

On the other hand, I may never get the opportunity or meet another ‘dubber’ (sorry but that’s what we call ourselves – from VeeDOUBleyew) who is the market for such mobile home improvements but I’ll lay you good odds that if Mel gives equal service to ten clients like us or VW van fan lady at least five of them will pay a part in generating new new business for Camper Comforts and that will feed into the exponential growth of a business that deserves to succeed.

Well done Mel, that’s the way to do it, and I will continue to apply the same principles to my bespoke fitted furniture business.

Now is the age when, thanks to the World Wide Web and Google, small independent businesses can go head to head with major players and often give a level of service and customer satisfaction that they will struggle to emulate.

How is the bespoke fitted furniture market faring in these difficult economic times?

Certainly the market has suffered, along with all the other home improvements during the recession and has been particularly affected by the downturn in the housing market.  As always we have had a long hiatus while people consider whether to move house or extend or improve the home they already have. I call this the change over from movers to improvers and over time although the proportion in each camp will vary the size of the market seems to stay much the same.  However with the uncertainty over job prospects and the tighter restrictions on lending, even the improvers are a little reluctant to show their hands.

Statistics are hard to find on this little niche of ours because what we do is specifically bespoke and fitted but spreads across several much larger markets, including bedrooms, home offices, living rooms, home entertainment units and home cinema.

The largest market segment for fitted furniture is in kitchens but it is a segment that we barely touch upon.

The only relevant market in which I can find any meaningful statistics is the bedroom furniture in which the fitted or built in part is relatively small, albeit growing. In 2009 the total UK market for bedroom furniture was estimated to be in the order of £620 million, down 10% on 2008 and projected to reach £635 million in 2010. These figures are for fitted and free standing bedroom furniture of all qualities and include imported as well as home manufactured. This does not give us a value for the bespoke, built-in market or for fitted furniture in other rooms of the house but it probably a reasonable extrapolation to assume that our particular niche will have been affected similarly and our experience suggests that this is the general trend.

Unfortunately, I cannot find any useful data for 2007 and before but my guess is that, given the demise of some of the major players who made up the overall market (MFI in particular) and numerous smaller players who have sadly folded their tents and crept away, that the total market has probably shrunk by between 20 and 30% since the height of the property boom and will take years to recover it’s former strength.

However, the anecdotal evidence suggests that we are turning a corner and, particularly at the luxury end of the market there is everything to play for.

I know that high earners like bankers and senior executives have taken a battering in the press and that many of them feel beleaguered but whatever the excesses, there can be no doubt that these are the people that, along with sports heroes and pop stars, who spend the most on their homes and will, hopefully, be buying high quality bespoke fitted furniture in the recovery years. I for one look forward to the trickle down effect to us who are further down the food chain.

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.

Modern technology: love it or hate it.

How dependent we have become in recent years on new technologies; mobile phones, the internet, satnav and on and on ad nausium.

And, how infuriating it is when these technologies fail to do what we expect them to do. in the past few weeks, I have experienced a failure of my mobile phone, on which I keep my diary and my satnav. Having scraped by without them for three weeks, I have got my phone back; with the storage completely wiped. Syncing to my PC with ActiveSync restored all my contact and my diary but reinstalling CoPilot, given that telephone support is withdrawn six weeks after you buy it means that if you need help you have to do it by email, which makes the send and response process painfully slow and is ‘doing my brain in’.

Enough of my personal frustrations, let’s have a look at effect of technology on bespoke furniture production. As with all these technologies, the benefits do eventually outshine the downsides, although when they do fail you they still drive you crazy.

Naturally, designing fitted furniture for clients involves appointments to visit their homes, for which my Outlook diary and satnav are irreplaceable. But when the technology really kicks in is after we have taken an order. The first part of the process is converting the designer’s notes and sketches into a working drawing that’s initial purpose is to help manage the essential process of iteration to ensure that our customer understands what we are going to produce and, vitally, that we understand our client’s expectations.  This process used to be conducted on a drawing board using drawing (or tracing) paper, a ruler , protractor and Rotring drawing pen. Edits were made by scratching  out ink with a razor blade and redrawing.  The end result often got very scruffy. The final draft would then be photocopied and sometimes tidied up with Tippex and pens.

Today we have Autocad and derivative drafting software that reduces the drawing board time significantly and, more importantly, facilitates unlimited edits with no loss of quality. Also, you can’t cheat a digital drawing, dimensions are exact to a millimetre and will not allow the furniture to be too big for the space into which it is to be fitted (can happen).

After the client has carried out their first audit of the working drawings, we send a surveyor to check the measurements and any tricky angles or shapes. The surveyor will then carry out another audit with the client, reinforce all the choices of finish, colour, handles etcetera and explain the more esoteric details of the drawings. At this point we pick up any detail changes and the surveyor revises the drawings in the same software and resubmits them for our customers approval.

Then in a spreadsheet workbook containing about 5,000 product codes permutated across dozens of door styles or ranges in scores of finishes and millions of individual unit prices to check our pricing and establish whether the drawing revisions affect the total price so that any changes can be agreed with the customer.

The final detailed drawings are then interpreted by the factory production scheduler and the dimensions and specification of each individual piece of bespoke furniture are then fed into another software programme that deconstructs every cabinet, wardrobe, chest of doors etcetera into its component parts and prints out schedules for purchasing the raw materials specifically required to manufacture and install the order. It also produces cutting lists for preparing the materials for production.

Before such technological advances, all of this work of drawing the finished furniture installation, ordering and cutting the raw materials was was done with pencil paper and a calculator.  The opportunities for error were massive.

It is hard to believe we were able to function before the new technologies.  Somehow we did but I can remember well the grief when components arrived on site in the wrong material or the wrong size.  I cannot say that mistakes never creep in but with the aid of computers we have managed the problems down to a minimum.

Yes, when the new technologies go wrong it drives me crazy but there is no way we would choose to go back to what seems like the stone age but is probably just a couple of decades ago. Long live the digital revolution!