Designing and making a piece of furniture sometimes only needs a few basic skills. Sometimes, however, it can bring together a variety of skills.
That’s the case with Timothy Low’s hallway table, which is bringing together skills in shaping wood, marquetry and woodcarving – on top of other cabinet making skills.
Timothy, from Singapore, has been working on furniture that doesn’t have permanent fixings, so that it can easily be taken apart.
He’s been working on a coffee table that incorporates a two-piece elm top, with an oak drawer which will have a sycamore and rosewood inlayed lid.
Everything on the table fits together using either tongue-and-groove fixings or hand-crafted dovetails.
That same idea has been taken forward into his next project, a console-style table made from layers of bendy ply and sycamore.
The front of the table has a woodcarving of a little girl who has lost her balloons, while the sides will have marquetry panels depicting a colourful funfair carousel.
His idea for easy-to-dismantle furniture came from wondering how, after graduation, he was going to transport his pieces of furniture back home to the other side of the world.
Timothy’s background in the offshore oil sector has equipped him with practical skills, and he hopes that designing and making furniture for easy disassembly and transportation could also be a good business idea.
