We recently wrote about one of our students who is incorporating several skills into one piece of furniture, including shaping wood, marquetry and woodcarving.

All of those skills, and more, are going into Timothy Low’s console-style table which is made from layers of bendy ply and sycamore.

Timothy, who is from Singapore and is a former oil worker, has hand-carved a little girl who has lost her balloons on the cabinet’s front, while the sides will have marquetry panels depicting a colourful funfair carousel.

His signature idea is to design furniture that doesn’t have permanent fixings, so that it can easily be taken apart.

He’s already completed a coffee table that incorporates a two-piece elm top, with an oak drawer with a sycamore and rosewood inlayed lid – all fitted together using either tongue-and-groove fixings or hand-crafted dovetails.

For his cabinet, Timothy is now adding gilding to the other skills involved in its design and construction, using pure 24 carat gold to bring the funfair carousels to life.

For the past two weeks we’ve been privileged to have the renowned gilding expert Richard Walker at the school, who is teaching our students the finer points of oil-gilding, water-gilding and verre eglomisé, the art of gilding onto glass.

Next week, we’ll feature more of our students’ gilding projects, and how they’re incorporating what they’ve learned into their work.