How we make it

Drawing

Everything is modelled in SolidWorks before a board is bought. Every cabinet, every rail, every joint, every appliance, drawn as a solid.

That catches the collisions on screen rather than at the bench: the drawer that fouls the oven handle, the corner cupboard that cannot open past the island, the cornice that dies into a bowed ceiling. It also produces the cutting list, so the timber ordered is the timber needed.

In listed work we draw the existing profiles first, taken in section from the fabric, and design against them.

Setting out on the rod

Then Paul Sims draws the whole thing again, full size, by hand, on a rod. A long board or a sheet of ply, marked out at 1:1, pinned up in the workshop above the bench where the job is being made.

Every stile width, rail height, shoulder length, panel size and joint is on it. Nobody at the bench works from a tape measure and a printed dimension; they work from the rod itself, marking directly off it.

It is old practice and it is not nostalgia. A dimension mistyped on a drawing is invisible. A dimension wrong on a rod is obvious the moment you hold a stile against it. The rod stays up until the job leaves.

Machining

Boards are cut oversize, left to settle in the shop, then faced, thicknessed and dimensioned. Frames are machined for in-frame construction: proper mortice and tenon, not dowels and not biscuits.

Mouldings are run on our Felder spindle moulder. For historic work we grind cutters to a profile taken from the building itself, so a new larder door in a Grade I house carries the same ovolo as the eighteenth-century joinery beside it. Nothing off a catalogue can do that.

The CNC does what it is good at: repeatable carcase parts, drilling patterns, shelf pins, tolerances held across forty boxes. The machine raises the floor; the maker raises the ceiling. It means nothing leaves here below a certain standard, and everything above that standard is put there by hand.

Assembly

Carcases are high-grade birch ply, not MDF and not particleboard, with solid backs rather than a pinned hardboard sheet. That is what lets a wall cabinet carry a shelf of stoneware and a base unit carry a slab of Belgian Black.

Drawer boxes are solid timber, dovetailed. Oak or maple as standard, sycamore where a library or gun room wants a paler interior. Bottoms are grooved in, not stapled on.

Doors are glued up, cramped, left, then flushed off and hand-sanded. Gaps are set at the bench, tight and even, before anything is finished.

Finishing

Everything is finished in our own spray booth at Mickfield. Nothing is sent out.

Painted work is primed, filled, denibbed, sprayed or hand-brushed, flatted between coats and finished. Timber is oiled, lacquered or French polished depending on where it is going to live. Sample boards on the actual door profile are made and approved before a full set is finished.

Dry-fit

Before anything is wrapped, the kitchen is stood up complete on the workshop floor. Runs assembled, doors hung, drawers in, handles on, cornice and plinth scribed to a mock-up of your floor levels.

We open every door, run every drawer, sight every gap, and put right anything that is not right, with the whole shop around us and every machine to hand. Doing that in your house, with a plasterer waiting, is how bad kitchens happen.

Then it comes apart, is labelled against the drawing, and is blanket-wrapped.

Delivery and fitting

Our own van, from Mickfield. Steve Bell, Jason Price and Gary Blake fit what they built.

That is the part we will not compromise on. The maker who cut the scribe knows why it is cut that way. There is no outsourcing of the important work: no subcontract fitting crew meeting your kitchen for the first time on your driveway.

Three to seven days on site. We take the packaging away with us.