cabinet maker Archives - Chippendale School of Furniture

Chippendale graduate honoured

A young Australian furniture designer who graduated from the Chippendale school professional course in June has been shortlisted for two awards in the prestigious Young Furniture Makers Awards.

Alex Stanton has been shortlisted, first, for his Shou Sugi Ban hall table in Ash (Design Award).

The second shortlisting was for his sideboard in Rosewood and Walnut veneers (Bespoke Award).

Organised by The Furniture Makers’ Company, Alex’s pieces will be exhibited at the Young Furniture Makers exhibition in October in the City of London.

Creative designers

The event showcases the very best furniture and furnishing design talent. It offers the industry the opportunity to connect with young, creative designers.

The Young Furniture Makers Awards are the student equivalent of the Company’s Guild Marks. They recognise excellence in the fields of bespoke, design and innovation.

24-year-old Alex, from Brisbane, is currently launching his business in the UK called Alexander Stanton Fine Furniture & Design.

He personifies the fact that you don’t have to have woodworking experience to come to the Chippendale school.

Many of our students come to us as novices, having never worked with wood before.

That’s not a problem because our 30-week professional course is designed to instil in everyone the confidence and skills to practice as a fine furniture maker.

It’s a course that has been fine-tuned over thirty years. It has also seen the Chippendale school become one of the most prestigious furniture schools in the world.

Alex did have the advantage of having had three years of experience fitting timber floors and staircases.

Visit Scotland

He’s also had a long interest in designing furniture and had made simple pieces such as tables.

Before making a final decision to come to the Chippendale school, Alex came to visit a few months before the first term began.

We always welcome visitors and are delighted to show people around our workshops.

That also includes the merely curious because the school is a 3* visitor attraction with Visit Scotland.

If you’d like to visit, you can arrange a visit here, or simply contact us here.

His first project was his shortlisted hallway table and, pictured above, is Alex’s design – which he then made as a scale model.

Design skill is the first thing that we teach our professional course students. Simply, if you can’t visualise your designs, you will struggle to make anything.

But learning that skill is made easy at the school. We have expert tutors and we bring in a renowned expert from France.

Console table

Alex’s finished Ash console table had beautiful decorative flourishes. For its legs, Alex moulded laminated supports that were a design echo of Gothic cathedral architecture.

He also incorporated African Ebony veneers into the leg supports, and carried that colour contrast through to the Douglas fir drawer fronts.

He used a burning technique, called Shou Sugi Ban, which originated in 18th century Japan.

It was initially used to preserve wood. Now, it’s more commonly used to bring different colours and textures into a piece of furniture.

Alex also made a small and delicate display cabinet in Oak and spalted Beech and a steam-bent coffee table in Olive Ash and spalted Beech.

His last piece, for which he has been shortlisted, was a fluted sideboard, pictured above, in rippled Rosewood with Walnut veneers.

Alex proved himself a gifted woodworker over his year with us. We’re delighted that he has been recognised so early in his career.

Some examples of the pieces of furniture created by a student during his 9 month course

A blog by a British army officer Lieutenant Colonel Guy Harnby who will become a student in October 2011

What made you choose the Chippendale International School of Furniture?

A friend and neighbour, Stuart Janion, was a former student of the school some 8 years ago and he recommended the Chippendale School of Furniture. He and his wife spent a very happy year living near the School in the Gifford area.

What are the attractions of furniture design and making?

Having spent nearly 30 years as a soldier, the idea of making and designing furniture offers new and exciting challenges; my Grandfather had been a cabinet maker at a firm in York for 40 years and I have a number of his pieces of furniture to inspire me!

Can you tell us something about your career in the army?

I joined the army in Berlin in 1982 before the wall came down, and have been privileged enough to serve in Norway, Denmark, Canada, USA, Zimbabwe, Cyprus, Bosnia, Iraq, Nepal, Northern Ireland and mainland UK, including the MOD in London.

I was commissioned into The Royal Regiment of Fusiliers in 1981 as a Second Lieutenant and will leave as a Lieutenant Colonel in October 2011.

More pieces of students' furniture

What are your motivations, aims and ambitions as a student on the furniture design course?

I have spent the past year actively involved in the Casualty Management area of wounded soldiers returning from the conflict in Afghanistan, and in Soldier Recovery.

I want to get involved in reintegrating sick, injured and wounded soldiers into society through the medium of wood and furniture making, and have a number of ideas to take the idea forward in the next 5 years! More to follow in time!

Simon Macintyre- Furniture Restorer

Simon Macintyre is a furniture restorer based in Arundel, West Sussex. He trained with Michael Hay-Will in 1981 (in the same class as Anselm) and set up shop a quarter of a mile down the road, where he has been restoring furniture ever since.
He is also a guest tutor on our cabinet making courses and for those who read our post about the Windsor chair restoration; it was under his expert guidance that it was brought back to its former glory.

And he is clearly not just an excellent furniture restorer, because while most of our students arrive here saying they have little interest in furniture restoration, the vast majority leave saying that furniture restoration is one of their biggest interests. One of last year’s graduates has even gone down South to work with him, so he must be doing something right!

He is a bit more modest. He believes that furniture restoration itself is what captures people’s imagination:

“There is a sense of history and tradition that accompanies restoring furniture,” he says. “You’re holding a piece that might be 300 years old, right in front of you, and you start wondering what the person who made it was like. Who has owned it? Who was the last person to polish it and restore it?”

Furniture Restoration vs Cabinet Making

He says that he understands why people might initially shy away from restoration. Even he started out thinking he wanted to be a cabinet maker, designing furniture. But he slowly came to realise that he had a greater aptitude for furniture restoration. He believes that cabinet making and furniture restoration feed the soul in different ways. “The ability to use a tool is a ‘skill’,” he muses, “whereas the ability to restore furniture is much more about having a ‘feel’.”

And so the pleasure comes not just from the sense of history and tradition, but from the nuts and bolts of revitalising antiques. “You have to imagine what the piece looked like in the past and you try to match that picture with a reality.” For Simon this means problem-solving and dealing with the subtle complexities of colour and patina.

For the Few, Not the Many

However, not everybody thinks the same way… Occasionally Simon will get an antique through the door that has been restored by a cowboy for whom restoration evidently means something completely different: “I do sometimes despair at what some people think it’s all about; trying to do furniture restoration with a pot of glue and a couple of nails is just plain wrong!” But by and large, taking apart history and breathing new life into old furniture is clearly as much a gentle lifestyle as it is a business for this man.

The Bottom Line

And what of the cabinet making? “While I still make the odd bit of furniture,” he says, “it’s not every day that someone walks through your door and orders a 3-piece suite. Restoration work is much more common.”

“But it’s never dull,” he adds. So despite the odd cold, grey, winter morning, he finds himself wanting to get up and go to work. Because even after 27 years on the job, he still finds it interesting, challenging and deeply rewarding.

Wepham Farm Stables
Wepham
Arundel
West Sussex
BN18 9RQ
01903 883387

macintyre641@aol.com

I am not a Cabinet Maker

Being a member of the Chippendale administrative team, it may surprise you to discover that despite working at one of the world’s most prestigious cabinet making schools, I have no talent whatsoever when it comes to woodworking. Read this story about the construction of a chicken hut for proof that Anselm needs to give me some free tuition!

[This is an archived post – the images are no longer available]

Go West!

I have been promising for ages to help a friend of mine build a chicken hut so that he can get round to the important business of keeping chickens. He lives many miles from me, up on Ben Lomond, but last weekend I finally bit the bullet and drove across the country to see him.

A Bad Woodworker Blames his Wood

I arrived expecting the unexpected, but was nevertheless horrified to discover that our building materials consisted of a shambolic array of broken palates, second-hand fencing posts and scavenged fire doors. From the outset it was clear to me that we were going to make amateurs DIYers look like master cabinet makers. This was further confirmed to me when my friend told me that his primary objective was to build a drawbridge into the front of the hut.

Taking the Plunge- Step 1

And so with more enthusiasm than talent, we took our first tentative steps. We first built a platform about 2 foot off the ground.

Step 2

We then built a little nesting box onto the back of the platform.

Step 3

By this time we had used up most of the half-decent wood but failed to see why this might be an issue. Up went the walls, one of which was an ancient, disused fire door. (We were very pleased with this because it made us happy to think that the chooks would have a nice view).

Step 4

Holes were starting to appear and so, unfortunately, were the midges. Two of us set about plugging the gaps while the other two kept on with the freestyle design-engineering.

Step 5- Abandon Ship

Finally, driven half-mad by the midges and all the self-created troubleshooting we were involved in, we abandoned the project for the pub, deciding that our host could finish the damned thing himself.

The final day’s work

A near perfect chicken hut made out of scrounged materials.

Except from the front which is an ungodly shambles, but thankfully not my problem.

In Conclusion…

I would totally recommend doing something like this, especially as a chicken hut can cost up to £1000. It is a really fun and worthwhile project to undertake, although probably only advisable is you want to keep chickens.

Hopefully I can offer you 3 small pieces of advice that might help prevent you from making the same mistakes we did (though I doubt any readers would be as foolishly unprepared as us):

1. Create a design before you begin. Don’t just make it up as you go along.

2. Get hold of some decent timber. You can pick up off-cuts from a local sawmill at firewood prices. They won’t be perfect but they’ll be a darn sight easier to work with than rotting palates.

cabinet maker