They may all have the same goal of making beautiful furniture that will stand the test of time but bespoke manufacturers have many different modus operandii and spheres of activity.
At Luke Hughes, for example, the focus is on designing and manufacturing furniture for public architectural spaces and for a 50-100 year life expectancy. It’s this expected longevity that is the main driver in species choice, although environmental considerations are also on the checklist.
“We tend to specify European and American hardwoods and don’t use any tropical species,” said Luke Hughes, who founded the company in 1981. “One reason for this is consistency of supply, another is that forest cover is increasing in those areas, so they are sustainable.
“The other practical point is that the six main hardwood species – oak, ash, beech, cherry, maple and walnut – work well with furniture,” he continued. “We mostly design furniture for heavy institutional use, so you have to use wood that is a) tough and b) that still looks good after being bashed around. And there is not much else like European oak for taking its knocks well.”
He added that of the estimated £500,000-worth of timber specified in a year, 70-80% of that is oak, and mostly European oak.
These days all of Luke Hughes’ production is outsourced. Around 90% of the manufacturing is carried out in workshops in the UK but the international nature of the commissions – and the scale of them – also calls on the skills of furniture makers further afield on occasions.
These workshops, many of which the company has worked with for a quarter of a century, are responsible for sourcing the timber to Luke Hughes’ specification.
“We have very tight quality criteria that all our manufacturers have to sign off on. We define the specification in terms of swing of grain, spacing, knots and shakes – all the usual stuff – and are very clear about what is acceptable and what is not.”
These criteria do vary depending on the end product. Chair construction has to be tightly controlled, for example, because “if a chair falls apart, we are going to carry the can”, so the company has to have close control of the production process and, with that, the timber selection process.
The company has conducted extensive research with Cambridge University over the decades, calculating the stresses in chairs.
“It’s not just about putting a chair under a test press and seeing when it collapses,” said Mr Hughes. “It’s about calculating the stresses in advance and doing the maths – what are the turning moments, what are the compression ratios, the Poisson’s ratios, what are the cleavage factors? We attach real importance to this and that’s how we’ve built the client base we have.”
Calculating the number of pieces of furniture manufactured in a year is not such an exact science, of course.
“We estimate we made more than 6,000 pieces of furniture over the last year,” said Sean Sutcliffe, who co-founded Benchmark with Sir Terence Conran in 1984. “Obviously some of those are quite small, accessory pieces, while others will be large.”
The estimate of a timber bill around £500,000 a couple of years ago is now closer to £750,000, partly due to the 20% price hike following the Brexit vote but also due to an increase in volume.
In terms of species mix, European white oak is still “head, shoulders, chest, waist and almost down to the knees” ahead of other species, somewhat to Mr Sutcliffe’s frustration.
“We have made quite a determined effort to try to persuade people to change,” he said.
“We would dearly love to use more ash because the combination of chalara and emerald ash borer is going to decimate our ash trees, so let’s use them rather than let them rot and go for firewood,” said Mr Sutcliffe. “As a woodworker it is fantastic to use but I think for too long it has had an association as a utility wood and we struggle to shift the perception.”
He added that it is the same with American cherry and that the company has used it for “project after project” to promote the species.
“It is gaining some traction and there is a move towards warmer tones,” he said. “There is definitely a resurgence of the mid-tone ranges in the US and people are drifting away from the very pale look. But it is still tiny and for commercial reasons we have to make what people want – and that is white oak. I can be a pioneering taste changer but I have also got to make a living.”
The taste for American black walnut seems to be waning, added Mr Sutcliffe, but it still takes second billing after white oak in terms of popularity.
“The proportion used to be around 65:35 but that has gone to, maybe, 75:25,” he said. One species Benchmark is working with more than in the past is elm, both Scottish and American, with some customers really relishing the “wildness” of the timber. In such cases the company is likely to visit its suppliers in order to hand-select specific logs.
“We usually buy from distributors and merchants and have pretty close relationships with them, so if we’re buying white oak they will select it for us,” said Mr Sutcliffe. “But if we’re buying something a bit out of the ordinary, such as European walnut and Scottish elm, we will go to the yard and choose it ourselves.”
Benchmark doesn’t always specify prime grades – not for commercial reasons but for aesthetics.
“There is often a visual imperative for character or colour,” said Mr Sutcliffe. “For example, where we are using ash, some of our customers prefer the biscuit-coloured rather than the prime white – they want the wood with a bit more colour and character. It goes back to this trend towards slightly warmer tones.”
For Keith Sealey Furniture, however, the aim is always for top grade timber and not what founder Keith Sealey refers to as “floorboard timber”.
“It’s just not clean enough,” he said. “We occasionally get asked to make something from a rough old piece of oak because the customer wants knots and splits and so on but it’s not really a material we want to use for fine furniture so we try to dissuade them.
“We also get less wastage with prime timber. If you go down a grade or two you might get boards that aren’t all that flat and then by the time they’re through a thicknesser planer they are thinner than you want them to be.” That said, the company has strayed from this path from time to time.
“We made the top to a kitchen island unit using brown pippy oak from a tree from the client’s own woodland,” said Mr Sealey. “The oak had been converted 30 or 40 years ago and stored in a barn and we went through the boards and picked out what we could use.
“It still had a moisture content of 18-20% so Whitmore’s Timber kilned it for us. Whitmore’s is one of a number of Sealey Furniture’s suppliers of solid timber – Lathams and Duffield Timber are also key suppliers – and the company estimates it uses around 300ft3 of mainly oak, maple, walnut, cherry, ash and tulipwood.
It also uses about 1,500 wood-based panels, which it usually sources from Lathams or Decormax, and purchases veneers from Nantwich Veneers.
“We use quite a lot of veneered board – oak, maple, walnut – and cherry seems to be becoming more popular now. We’ve been doing quite a bit of veneering ourselves for the exotic species and completed a project recently where we used a lot of macassar ebony veneer.
On the panels front, the company uses less standard MDF now, preferring to use MR MDF because it finds it is better for finishing the edges of pieces that are painted and sprayed finished.
The company is also using good quality birch plywood rather than MDF where it has the opportunity. “It’s a bit more expensive than MDF but it’s lighter and some of the pieces we make are quite large, so it helps to keep the weight down,” said Mr Sealey. Flexi ply is also in the materials box.
“We’ve been making a lot of curved pieces over the last couple of years so we’re also using quite a bit of flexi-ply, although in some instances if the curves are quite tight we’ve used 3mm standard MDF and taken it down through our speed sander and then laminated it up in that material. That gives us a smoother outside finish than the flexi ply.”
Sebastian Cox has a very hands-on approach to sourcing his timber. Ten per cent of what is used in the workshop is sourced by his team direct from his family’s own woodland and 90% of the timber (including that belonging to the company’s private clients) is processed on its portable mill.
“This is set to change next year though, as we introduce a new collection of furniture made exclusively from the wood we have harvested from our woodland this winter,” said Mr Cox.
His furniture also includes pieces made from coppiced timber.
“Coppicing is such an ecologically friendly way to grow and source material,” he said. “It produces an entirely renewable source of material and genuinely boosts biodiversity in the process. Regardless of how much coppiced wood we use in our work we continue to manage the woodland in this way because of the incredible benefits to the ecosystem there.”
For Mr Cox, timber selection is all about character and his eye is taken by wood with interesting colour and design detail.
“More and more we find our clients come to us because they want characterful wood. They’re encouraging us to source boards with bark, knots, pipping, swirling and defined heart and sap wood,” he said.
He added that a commission to make a series of “definition screens” for Burberry had required “a lot of beautiful English oak”, and that he hoped to get more material harvested from his own wood into bespoke and collection pieces and into people’s homes.
“We currently have a gorgeous boule of alder and of pear which we can’t wait to use,” he said.
Sebastian Cox’s designs are very “material driven”, with the starting point being the piece of wood and the furniture design following on. This is often a collaborative decision, with the furniture maker taking cues from things the clients like and are interested in to suggest the best selection of species.
“Clients often take a look through individual boards of these species in the mill and choose what feels right,” said Mr Cox.
At Sealey Furniture, it is generally the design that dictates the timber spec but as a fellow bespoke manufacturer, client input is key. And they are getting better at it.
“Clients are starting to make mood boards for us and having Pinterest pages and that is really helpful,” said Mr Sealey. He added that he thinks clients are paying more attention to their home interiors now and has noted this trend spreading out from London.
“Two or three years ago a lot of our work was in London but now we are getting more work locally in Leicestershire. They may not be prepared to pay London prices, but they are prepared to pay more for something bespoke if they can’t find exactly what they want in a high street store. They’re not going through interior designers yet, as they do in London, but I think that will come.”
Benchmark also buys timber appropriate to the design – the exception being on some pieces within its collections that feature a waney edge.
“This is the case with our Darby table and we also have a new desk within our workplace collection which is called Sylva,” said Mr Sutcliffe. “Here the wood dictates the design.”
Meanwhile, at Luke Hughes, it is the building within which the furniture sits that steers the timber selection and design.
“It’s a collaborative process. Our job is to make sure that the building continues to work ergonomically for the people who inhabit it – it’s not just about aesthetics. To some extent we have to suppress our own egos in these projects. If we get the furniture right the building works and everyone wins.
“All our work is bespoke but quite often it is ‘tailored’ and developed from long-proven designs from the 40-year portfolio, rather than always starting with a clean sheet,” said Mr Hughes. “When designing for Oxford, Cambridge, Yale or Harvard they take a 50-100 year view and fashion doesn’t come into it.”
One thing Luke Hughes, Benchmark, Sealey Furniture and Sebastian Cox have in common is that they are all super-busy.
After his success with Burberry, Sebastian Cox is working with other brands to help them evolve their approach to retail.
“So much retail takes place online that brands with real estate need to think carefully and creatively about how they use these spaces to really make an impact,” said Mr Cox.
“We’re thoroughly enjoying shaping entire spaces, rich with narrative, as well as then producing the right furniture.”
Benchmark, meanwhile, has just completed a project for Comcast Corporation in Philadelphia and a large consignment of white oak “community workspace” furniture from its Ovo collection has just been ordered by the Cleveland Clinic in Ohio.
Closer to home it is making several hundred dining tables, consoles tables, stools and so on for apartments for a major developer in Manchester and it is supplying burry or pippy oak furniture to Heckfield Place hotel in Hampshire.
Sealey Furniture has found itself furnishing a number of cinema rooms recently, including “one of the nicest things we’ve made” – a 10ft long media unit in macassar ebony veneer with highly polished steel inlays.
And for Luke Hughes last year, a project for Keystone Academy in China saw the company design, manufacture (in 23 workshops up and down the UK) and ship 24 tonnes of furniture in the space of four months.
The company has also recently made the new liturgical furniture for Ely Cathedral and furniture for Congregation Beit Simchat Torah in Manhattan, which is thought to be the largest LGBT synagogue in the world. In fact Luke Hughes is currently working on no fewer than seven synagogues in New York.
