“Open that top drawer and have a sniff,” suggests designer-maker Jan Hendzel, pointing to his sleek and wavy-fronted Bowater cabinet. “It’s cedar,” he says. “The outside is brown oak. It’s so lush.”
The ripple is one of his signature details — and a cool, contemporary approach to the centuries-old tradition of wooden furniture-making. Hendzel is one of a new wave of makers subverting classic techniques or using new technology to make woodwork with a wow factor. Hendzel’s curvy drawers, for instance, are designed and cut digitally then finished by hand, which makes them “burnished and luxurious looking, with a depth and vibrance”, he says. “The timber just pops.”
Hendzel is showing me around his workshop at Thames-Side Studios in Woolwich, south-east London — the 19th-century site of the Siemens Brothers Telegraph Works factory that today is a conglomerate of creative spaces. Hendzel has established a furniture-making practice that “fuses the woodworker’s long-established knowledge of material and hand-tools with innovations in machining technology”.
Both his early experience as a patternmaker (making wooden moulds to cast tools for the automotive and aircraft industries) and his later design education at Central Saint Martins come into play. The elegantly rounded Pier table, for example, has three cylindrical legs, each made of 12 flat strips, while the top features a patchwork of inlaid sections.
Furniture by Jan Hendzel, made at his studio in Woolwich, south-east London © Fergus Coyle
Hendzel’s work, he says, aligns with a broader “craft uprising” in carpentry. “In London, there’s definitely been a grassroots swell of makers and designers,” says Sophie Pearce, the director of vintage furniture store Béton Brut, whose first own-brand furniture launch features sculptural chairs and tables designed by Benni Allan, made from solid, UK-grown oak. She also cites the offerings of Fred Rigby and Edward Collinson as part of a thriving furniture scene. Other names to note are Bibbings & Hensby and Wilkinson & Rivera, two east London-based design-maker duos who are reinterpreting classic furniture forms.
But traditional carpentry techniques are also being reinvigorated further afield. In Bosnia and Herzegovina, for example, a rural woodcarving workshop founded in the late 1800s has been rebranded as the design firm Zanat by fourth-generation family members Orhan and Adem Nikšić. They are keeping the area’s traditional (and Unesco-protected) carving technique alive by partnering with internationally renowned designers. The 2022 collection includes geometric-patterned chests of drawers by Italian architect and former Memphis design group member Michele de Lucchi, as well as organically shaped Meduza lamps by German designer Sebastian Herkner, the maple or walnut wood subtly incised with stripes and dots.
In the US, a fusion of furniture and folk art is bringing handcrafted woodwork to the fore. Sculptor Casey McCafferty’s new collection, on show at The Future Perfect’s new LA gallery, includes a dining table, a desk, armchairs and benches, all in his boldly biomorphic and totemic style, in woods ranging from oxidised walnut to sandblasted and ebonised ash and Douglas fir.
‘Sculptural Bench in Blue’, made of ash by Casey McCafferty, at The Future Perfect gallery in Los Angeles
Also in California, Vince Skelly explores “the relationship between ancient building forms and their similarity to contemporary architecture and furniture”, creating chunky, roughly hewn tables, chairs and stools in local white oak and Western red cedar. His latest collection, created for gallery Tiwa Select, is called “After the Storm”; it was produced from trees blown down in his hometown of Claremont, including deodar cedar, pine, redwood eucalyptus and magnolia.
More polished in its production and pared back in its aesthetic is LA-based Kalon Studios, founded by Michaele Simmering and Johannes Pauwen. A recent collaboration with Reath Design sees the simple lines of their sugar pine-framed Rugosa sofa, daybed and chair augmented with a joyful, vintage-inspired mish-mash of upholstery.
Sustainable production is a shared interest among all these craft-makers and design houses. Zanat only uses wood from sustainably managed forests; it also plants three new trees for every one used to make its products. McCafferty works with a friend’s family-owned sustainable lumber yard. Hendzel, meanwhile, uses a combination of reclaimed and sustainably sourced British wood.
Rugosa Chair, a sugar pine-framed piece that is part of a collaboration between Los Angeles-based Kalon Studios and Reath Design © Kalon Studios
“We try to keep our network of suppliers quite tight,” he says. “We use a lot of hyperlocal London timber. We’ve got London plane in at the minute.” He also uses chestnut, sycamore and ash, he says, although “everyone wants oak, but oak is about five times the cost of ash”.
His latest project — the complete overhaul of two rooms at the Town Hall Hotel in Bethnal Green, unveiled at the London Design Festival (September 17-25) — incorporates reclaimed London plane timber from Denmark Hill train station. The scheme will include Pier tables and Bowater drawers, alongside bespoke kitchens, newly developed chairs and a sofa, “some sculptural bits” and laboriously hand-gauged, highly textural mirrors that he describes as “a bit neolithic”.
The ‘After the Storm’ collection by Vince Skelly (pictured with gallerist Alex Tieghi-Walker) is made from trees blown down in his hometown of Claremont, California © Justin Chung
Just down the corridor from Hendzel’s Woolwich studio is the self-described “zero-waste, carbon-counting workshop” of furniture maker Sebastian Cox. His process begins with milling his own materials from woodland he manages in Kent, and ends in timeless, “heirloom” classics such as the Windsor chair-inspired Bayleaf carver chair in oak.
Other designs come with a twist: pared-back shapes made ultra-modern in black scorched wood or dyed in playful shades of blue or green with natural pigments. The British Species tallboy is more subtly colourful, its light-to-dark run of drawers made variously of sycamore, cherry, London plane, elm and walnut. The Hewn range of chairs, tables and benches highlights their source with hazel legs coppiced in Cox’s woodland and left as bark-covered branches.
Cox is also one of a number of designers involved in the One Tree project by furniture brand SCP, also part of London Design Festival. It consists of one-off pieces by different designers, all made from a tree in SCP founder Sheridan Coakley’s garden. “It was felled because of ash dieback, a disease that causes cavities and unusual grain patterns in the timber,” says Coakley. “What’s interesting is how diverse the outcomes are — from turned bowls by Max Bainbridge to a hand-carved love seat by Faye Toogood,” he says. “The project also walks the line between design and craft. It’s not every day that designers are tasked with not only designing something, but also having to make it themselves.”
Max Bainbridge with his bowl made of an ash tree felled because of dieback, part of the SCP One Tree project
For husband-and-wife furniture makers Grant Wilkinson and Teresa Rivera, however, the task echoed their own studio practice. Educated in fine art but self-trained in woodwork, they set up Wilkinson & Rivera in 2021 and hand-make all their wavy and wobbly wares in a shipping container in Walthamstow. For One Tree, they have come up with the Rough Cut bench, which they describe as “feeling simple, with geometric forms inspired by sculptors such as Brancusi and JB Blunk, held together by traditional hand-cut joinery”.
Their limited-edition Of Nature series for SCP is more complex; it includes the Silla de Baile lounge chair — whose sinuous spindles are inspired by 17th-century, barley-twist woodwork — and four new chairs also on display at London Design Festival. Inspired by a 1960s artwork by American sculptor Richard Serra, each handcrafted seat is made in a different wood: spalted beech, London plane, yew and rippled maple.
In Hackney, Fred Rigby approaches wood in another way. “We are more of a design studio, less of a manufacturer,” he says from his showroom — a space where his furniture is “finished and assembled”, bringing together, say, an oak top with powder-coated steel base from various suppliers across the UK. But he is equally impassioned about using solid wood. “We created our Cove sofas to be almost inside-out,” he says of the oak-encased upholstered designs. “They have the honesty on the outside. But everything is also designed to add a playful element to the home.”
A new range of homewares includes the oak and ash Totem plates and bowls, which can be stacked into appealing sculptural forms. A version of the rounded Tide chair is made from ash, painted red. “I like the way that the grain pops up,” he says. “Oak has a denser, flatter grain, whereas ash has a bit more texture to it, not to be a massive geek . . . ” On the contrary: knowing the nitty-gritty of wood is ultra-cool right now.
Find out about our latest stories first — follow @FTProperty on Twitter or @ft_houseandhome on Instagram
https://www.ft.com/content/be05aa95-c726-48d6-8a65-27e481f2c256
