MATTHEW GOING ON

Peace in the workshop

A quiet moment of repose on a ‘winding yourself back up for it’ cold mid-January Saturday.

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A working space can be lifted above the ordinary.

A working space can be lifted above the ordinary. This generous brief allowed me to design beyond the mundane & to deliver a generous working environment & a marriage between the work-a-day & beyond. I used four types of English oak. Tiger oak for the boardroom table, its consoles & sideboard, straight oak for the desks/worktables, pippy oak for the large cupboards & finally 'bricks' of Lucombe oak in the waiting foyer's wall. Photos @jonstonephotography. #offices #officeinteriors #officefurniture #beyondthemundane #supportpeopleinsheds #lovenpeace

It must have been in the late 1980s when I designe

It must have been in the late 1980s when I designed and made 'Kissing Seat' 1. The first had a seat hewn with an adze. Later I move on to an arbotec & flexible discs on an anglegrinder, which sped things up & lessened the risk of slicing through an ankle with the said adze. Here you can see 'Kissing Seat' 2. Designed and first made perhaps five years ago, a total different concept. Both have revolving balls which say too much about my Englishness & reticence in things romantic, they are there to fiddle whilst you pluck up courage or to fondle in a reverie of things to come. The first ones I made in oak, rich in tannin & hence robust in the face of the vagaries of our British summers. The new version I now make them in sweet chestnut, which is similarly rich in tannin but is less prone to split, is easier to work, quicker grown & an unsung hero amongst the British timbers. Once it was a plentiful coppice timber covering the Kent, Sussex & Hampshire landscapes, cut on eleven year cycles & used to fence most of the counties paddocks. Sadly today it is much depleted due to the labour intensity of coppicing. Coppicing was such a sophisticated compromise with biology. Recognising as it did the three canopies in woodlands, the tall standards, cropped once a century, the protein nut bearing shrub layers, cropped on 7 & 11 year cycles & then beneath, the grazing to be had on the herb layer, annually. Such elegance is beyond the crudity of mechanisms invented by bean counters, God bless them, very important but they must be fettered by culture & values & ultimately biology. We are after all biological creature living within biological constraints. # Back to earth again...I will, of course make you either Kissing Seat' 1. or 2. #romance #romanticseats #romanticsitting #outsidebenches #outsideseating #coppicing #sweetchestnut #gardenseats #gardens #makersandmaking #designandmake #supportpeopleinsheds #biology #planetearth

Our 'Four-Pebbles-in-a-Pool' cabinet, in English o

Our 'Four-Pebbles-in-a-Pool' cabinet, in English oak. We have made this, both wall mounted & free standing on legs. Designed to play games with the light of the day....there is obviously more to it than meets the eye...& that's what I am aiming to get across. Timber is beautiful all the way through with subtle differences in its grain whichever way it's viewed, enhanced by the light of day. #furniture #interiors #lightplay #timberplay #wood #timber #daylight #making #designing #designandmake #supportpeopleinsheds #lovenpeace

A tree's end-grain is looking into time, looking i

A tree's end-grain is looking into time, looking into a record of recycled sunshine & rainwater, the narrative of the tree's existence. I am fascinated by it & have incorporated it into my furniture designs on a recurrent basis since I first started designing. Each species has its recognisable features, each individual its quirks & foibles. This gazing into time can have its contemplative moments & its practical uses, from the durability of a butchers hornbeam block, to the front panel of one of my 'Bench Chests'. I have a 72"(1830mm) x 41"(1040mm) panel consisting of 1980 end-grain blocks hanging on my studio. I refer to it as an 'Epitaph to the Elm'. I designed it as a memorial to the trees that towered above my youth & under which I got up to such unspeakable mischief. The elms all disappeared in the years of my apprenticeship & I've been mourning them ever since. They remain as a hedgerow species and they grow for 12 or 15 years then they die back again. Apparently they become sexually mature around this time which prompts them to emit a scent, that attracts the beetle, that brings with it the fungus, that kills the tree. A poignantly cruel paradox. Surely its not beyond the whit of humankind to research and discover an inoculation that could protect this exquisite tree. It reflects our priorities that as yet we have not done so. There are some that are planting what may turn out to be an elm that's disease resistant called a White Elm, Ulmus laevis. #interiors #furniture #interiorfurniture #interiordecoration #intetiordesign #bespokefurniture #elms #dutchelmdesease #trees #handmadefurniture #handmade #suppoertpeopleinsheds #lovenpeace

Occasionally I'm asked to design outside my comfor

Occasionally I'm asked to design outside my comfort zone. If you're running a furniture 'Design & Make' company in the UK you need to consider all requests & be prepared to be surprised. Glass tables is an example of this. My first response was, not my favourite material to work, it's noisy & and tad unforgiving but worth exploring. The first pic is the old boy panicking in a photo shoot wealding a client's cordless hoover, a novelty to me at the time! His design request was eccentric in all senses of the word. " Can you design me an 1800mm diameter glass table supported eccentrically....& I do like your cantilevered pieces" first time that I'd had to use a glass engineer & bring him in from the Shard & its like. He assured me on the sums & hey presto, the 'Jesus-nut' held!! It's still giving good service. The second series is an expanding glass topped table with stainless steel under frame & bog oak infills. Say no more. They both have an intentional precarious vibe but both are built like the proverbial brick ......... I thought I preferred glass in the hand, or in a window but I was caught off guard with these two.... I'll raise one this Friday evening after another exciting week designing a memorial bench for a wonderfully exotic location, & then back to earth with more prosaic pieces for a friend's delightful home. Both will have our stamp upon them but both will be built with their client's use of them, & hopefully enjoyment of them, foremost in mind... #interiors #glassfurniture #glasstables #interiorandhome #britishmadefurniture #bespoke #bespokedesign #bedpokemaking #bespokefurniture #supportpeopleinsheds #lovenpeace

Mid-week post...what's happening? well 3000 follow

Mid-week post...what's happening? well 3000 followers seemed like a good excuse to let one's hair down and put out a mid-week post. This is a lovely Georgian house in the Royal Crescent in Bath. A 'pyramidalised Dresser' in walnut, a sideboard in bogoak and ash, a 'Partner's Desk' in tiger oak & some shelving in burnt & brown oaks. All the timbers were British, except the walnut where we joined our American cousins in their love of all things Bath & bought some of their walnut off
'em. I designed all the pieces to have a bit of hutzpah... well if you can't do it at The Royal Crescent where can you? #interiors #theroyalcrescent #bath #bathbuildings # britishinteriors #britishfurniture #britishdesign #supportpeopleinsheds #lovenpeace

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