From elegant tables crafted by bespoke manufacturers to squashy sofas produced in the hundreds by retail giants, timber is at the heart of the furniture sector.
While high value solid wood species are much in evidence, of course the volume of timber used varies according to the business model. And, in truth, it’s not always a figure at the forefront of the mind.
“We don’t track it but, roughly speaking, we buy around £500,000 of timber per year, which we think is about 500m3,” said Sean Sutcliffe, who co-founded Benchmar with Sir Terence Conran in 1984. “We’re small compared to a volume organisation but for a craft workshop we’re probably quite big,” he said, adding that calculating the number of pieces of furniture the company made was even trickier.
“Our best guess is around 5,000 pieces a year but we really don’t know. Most pieces are one-offs and we will never make them again.”
Keeping track of timber volumes and the number of pieces produced is not the raison d’être for Keith Sealey either. The owner of Leicestershire-based Sealey Furniture said the company uses around 200m3 of solid timber a year and “about a thousand sheets” of panel products. The company buys both veneered board and raw board for veneering in-house.
Again, because of the bespoke nature of the work, output is hard to calculate. “Our focus in recent years has been on house interiors where we will work either with an interior designer or direct with the client,” said Mr Sealey. “A whole house interior would include some freestanding pieces and also a lot of built-in bathroom, bedroom and kitchen furniture. We might work on a job for six months and make 30 pieces for that particular project.”
While the species used in UK furniture making may not all be home-grown, most are sourced within the UK, either through merchants and distributors, direct from hardwood sawmills or, in some cases, hewn by hand from the woodland itself.
In many cases – though not all – it’s the design that tends to dictate the type of timber specified, rather than a piece of wood suggesting a form.
“For the most part we buy timber appropriate for the design,” said Mr Sutcliffe. “However, there are instances where we find a remarkable piece of wood, or we have a vague idea of something we want and then find the wood. Then the wood absolutely dictates the size, look and feel of what we are making.
“This is particularly true of the Darby table within our domestic furniture range. That is completely driven by finding the wood first and making the table around it, so what the customer is buying in to is always remarkable.”
“If I find a piece of wood I like I will save it and try to make something really special but that is exceptional,” said Mr Sealey. “It’s the nature of our work that the design comes first. I can’t think of an occasion when a client has come to us with a piece of wood and said ‘can you make something out of that?’. It’s more a case of ‘I want a piece of furniture that does this, can you make it?’.” For Sebastian Cox, however, the design process is “material driven”.
“I have never sat down to design ‘a new cabinet’,” said Mr Cox. “I have always, instead, been grappling with a material challenge. My collaboration with Benchmark on the Chestnut and Ash Collection was our chance to put coppiced wood into mass production. I had to ask very nicely if we could put a round pole of chestnut into their four-sided planer. I taught their craftsmen how to cleave and together we developed an understanding of the material and the designs came directly from that.”
The actual timber selection process varies, with some jobs relying on strong relationships with suppliers who understand what is required and others calling for a very hands-on approach by the furniture maker. “Boards of timbers such as ash or plane, sycamore and oak are either selected by me or someone from my team,” said Mr Cox. “Chestnut or hazel, which is coppiced, is picked by us all in the woods and cut down with our own axe.”
The specification can cover a wide spectrum of grades and aesthetics. “You want something the right thickness, length and width,” said Mr Cox. “You have to plan around strength-affecting splits and shakes but try to incorporate as much of the natural character of the wood as possible. “I try to find the boards of any species that really typify its natural look. Ash can be streaky, with heavily defined heart and sapwood, so I like the boards where this is really apparent and the division is striking and beautiful. I love pippy oak and very lively lacewood. These features are what makes wood beautiful and they are the things I want my furniture to highlight.”
Timber with distinctive character is also specified by Benchmark when the commission calls for it.
“At the moment I am sourcing timber for a very large steam bending job we’re doing for curved auditorium seating at Worcester College, Oxford and I’m looking for really good straight grained and knot-free air dried oak,” said Mr Sutcliffe.
However, he added: “We recently did a job for Cathy Pacific’s first class lounge at Hong Kong International Airport and they wanted the wildest walnut we could find.”
For very particular projects where it is “all about the wood”, Benchmark will hand select the timber. “For example, we’re making a huge European walnut reception desk at the moment and spent months and months trying to locate the right log for that,” said Mr Sutcliffe. “It is being used very naturally, so wane and defects included, and it’s like a big piece of nature standing in an otherwise rather austere reception atrium in a new office block.”
That “right log” was supplied by Lincolnshire-based Nelson Butler & Sons but Benchmark has close relationships with other hardwood specialists, including Tyler Hardwoods, which is based close to the company’s workshop in Kintbury, near Hungerford.
Sealey Furniture’s solid timber suppliers include Whitmore’s Timber and James Latham and “for more exotic timber”, Sykes Timber. Lathams also supplies panel products to the furniture maker, as does Decormax.
“There are some specialist jobs each year where we go and hand pick boards but normally I provide a specification [for the supplier]”, said Mr Sealey. “For convenience we tend to buy square edged boards of fairly consistent widths, which we then plane ourselves.”
The company works with North American maple, cherry and walnut and “quite a lot” of oak, preferring the European to the North American species in this case.
Walnut presents challenges due to the amount of sapwood, which is hard to eliminate but, in some cases, it is incorporated into the furniture to add interest and character.
“We’ve just made some bookcases in walnut for a small library and have used some of the sapwood to bring some detail into it. It looks really nice.”
“We tend not to use African hardwoods as the grain can be very interlinking and it can tear when you’re trying to machine it and some have aggressive dust,” said Mr Sealey. He has used wenge recently, however, both in solid and veneer forms.
Sebastian Cox’s signature collection, Bayleaf, features British ash, oak, sycamore and lacewood but two of his “absolute favourites” are chestnut and hazel. “I always try to work them in where appropriate,” he said. “I love these species for their individual qualities – including the aesthetics and working properties.
“We now use cedar in all our drawer bottoms and the main reason I love it so much is the smell – cedar smells wonderful.” Iconic British brand Ercol Furniture uses a number of hardwoods and says that designs created in the 1950s and 1960s are as popular and relevant today as when they were originally created.
“Designs that were created in the 1950s are mainly crafted in ash, elm and beech, which was due to the availability of timber and the practicality of executing designs when they were first created,” said a spokesperson. “More recent designs are made mainly in oak, due to customer demand for pale furniture. A limited amount of walnut is also used.”
Benchmark will work with any species that has proven environmental and socially responsible credentials.
“We are, first and foremost, a sustainable and ethical supply company and have taken that very seriously for over 30 years,” said Mr Sutcliffe. “Other than that I am open to any species. I recently had a conversation about cinnamon wood from Sri Lanka, which seems to have some interesting qualities and which is available as a by-product of coppicing for cinnamon stick production.
“I’m particularly interested in any wood that has a story to tell because it gives an additional narrative.”
He acknowledged that oak and walnut are still the dominant species but said he longed for some diversity and “better utilisation of the forest mass”. He would like to see a resurgence of the warmer toned, mid-range colours of cherry and even some of the mahoganies that are sustainably produced. And he is very keen on the use of ash.
“Ash is the most fantastic wood for a furniture maker,” he said. “It’s versatile, it works well, it has a very good strength to weight ratio, it bends well, it’s shock resistant and it stains well. It’s got almost everything going for it but it’s always been regarded as a utility wood and has never been valued. “I firmly believe that we should look to ash because it is going to disappear – if chalara doesn’t get it then the emerald ash borer is on it’s way and will devastate everything in its path.
“Elm was a utility wood used for coffins and floorboards but now it’s a rarity we value it. I want to get the message out about ash that we should value it while we still have it, rather than regret it when it’s gone.” Happily, a high value residential project for John Pawson Ltd does use ash, which is a real turnaround for the architectural designer, who is known for his penchant for oak.
Benchmark is also working with designer Gareth Neal on some gallery projects and these, too, will use ash. “We’re using the most utility of the woods in an extremely high value way by adding craftsmanship and intellectual value,” said Mr Sutcliffe. “It’s an interesting process.”
Timber in its very natural state and as close to the natural form of the tree as possible – waney edges, defects, sapwood – is still very much in vogue said Mr Sutcliffe, while Keith Sealey said he prefers the end product to showcase the natural timber and he avoids staining it whenever possible. “Just recently we fumed some oak – put it into a container with ammonia to turn it a darker brown colour – but we don’t often do things like that.”
Ercol says its customers favour clear lacquer for its oak furniture, so the timber remains pale. A light stain on ash furniture gives “a golden finish”, said the company. Mr Sealey added that when working with an interior designer the furniture design was “collaborative” but that when working directly with the client, he would steer them in the direction of a design that was not necessarily traditional, but was timeless and classic.
Along with the aforementioned bookcases, and “a couple of kitchens”, current projects include a cloakroom with a statement veneered oak vanity unit and fitted wardrobes. “The vanity unit is an open frame with a massive piece of fossilized limestone on the top. The wardrobe runs along the length of the room and has flush sliding doors. We’ve done a lot of work in that room to make it look simple, but there is £1,000-worth of mechanism in the wardrobes to make the doors work the way they do.”
Sebastian Cox is working hard on a number of private commissions, including some pieces in elm, which he’s “fallen in love with”. He’s also developing new pieces for the Bayleaf collection, inspired by the medieval house at the Weald and Downland Museum, and he’s working on a number of material collaborations with other designers.
“Sustainable design is a principle the workshop and design studio were founded on so we’re always working hard in the background to realise our ambition of changing the way people engage with the objects around them,” said Mr Cox. “We have something exciting up our sleeve in this area, which we’ll share as soon as we can.”
Meanwhile, Ercol’s in-house design studio is constantly creating new, contemporary ranges to complement the Original’s collection created by the company’s founder Lucian Ercolani in the 50s and 60s.
New ranges are launched twice a year – at the Furniture Show at the NEC in January and at the Ercol Open House in May. “In recent years we have been driving our international business and this year we showed at the major international furniture shows in Paris, Cologne, Milan and New York,” said the spokesperson
