Celebrating Materiality, Design and Traditional Craft
Band-sawn oak cladding - our design legacy
It begins long before a panel meets a wall, or sawn cladding becomes a door. It begins with a log. A boule. We walk the stack and hand-select boards with character. Knots that tell you where the wind once leaned on the tree. We favour grain with a story because our story is craft. Fine cabinet making learned the hard way. Traditional timber framing taught in cold air with oversized chisels and even bigger ideals. The saw marks we love are a nod to that lineage. Honest. Rhythmic. A memory of hand timber conversion, a link to forestry, refined for a kitchen that will be lived and worked in properly.
The traditional making process
We deep down the board. An old phrase we keep alive. One inch oak. About 260 wide. Through the resaw to open it into three solid veneers with a deliberate, pleasing sawn face. The texture is not decoration. It is structure you can see. We regularise the back through the thicknesser, so every board hits the same note.
Five millimeters true. Vernier callipers out. Measure, check, measure again. The face side never touches a planer. We protect the saw’s signature. Now our signature. Sanding is not erasing. It is care. Wide belt to kiss off the chaos. Orbital to settle the grain. You still read the journey. You still feel it with your palm.
Assembly is choreography. We align the grain so it runs from panel to panel in succession. Doors become paragraphs. A larder front reads like one board moving through time. Joints are precise but modest. Honest. The structure holds while the oak does the talking. We finish with products we trust. Raw, or blackened. Each choice is a mood rather than a mask. Oak remains oak.
Modern kitchen design for the way we live now
Blocks and zones. That is our design language. A storage block that carries the band-sawn cladding like a quiet monolith. A cook zone with flat panel Richlite drawing a clean line so the oak can breathe. Islands that invite touch. A run that slips into Other rooms without fanfare. We use proportion with intent. Golden ratio when it serves the eye. The Pareto 80/20 rule, when it serves the budget and the brief. A little texture, placed well, gives you a lot of atmosphere.
Getting the best out of a living material means listening to it. We let boards acclimatise. We balance faces. We detail edges so they wear honestly. We select finishes that preserve the grain's natural texture. We educate as we go. Clients visit the workshop. They see the boule. They see the veneers. They see why a seam lines up with a handle and why it matters.
The kitchen is a serious investment
People ask why it is the most expensive element of what we do. Time. It is always time. Selecting. Deeping down. Resawing. Callipers out. Thicknessing backs only. Aligning grain over a whole elevation. Sanding with restraint. Building a panel that appears effortless, yet is anything but. Hundreds of skilled hours layered until the texture sits there as if it was always meant to be.
The payoff is not a facade. It is depth. When light hits a band-sawn surface pre-breakfast, you understand the craft. When the room reverberates with voices at night, you feel the calm of real material under your hand. This is the language we have shaped over the years. Oak with memory. Kitchens with soul. Texture that lives.
