The makers
Nine people make everything we sell, in one workshop in Suffolk, and the same hands fit it in your house.
Eight makers, one workshop
Square & True is the kitchen work of Reeve & Co Interiors, a family joinery house founded in 2015. There are ten of us at Stonham Road, Mickfield.
That is the whole company. No design studio in one county and a factory in another, no subcontract fitting crews, no white-labelled carcases arriving flat-packed. Everything is drawn, machined, assembled, finished and fitted by the people below.
It also means you will meet most of them. Clients come to the workshop by appointment, usually once during machining and once during finishing.
Torben Reeve, founder and director
Torben started the company in 2015 and still prices every job himself. If you telephone about a kitchen there is a good chance he answers.
He is the one who will tell you, early and without ceremony, that your budget and your brief do not meet, or that the island you want is 300mm too long for the room to work round. Most people find that useful about a week later.
He signs off every cutting list before timber is ordered. It is the last point at which a mistake is free.
Oliver Manning, Design Manager
Oliver runs the design side. He does your survey, draws the job in SolidWorks, produces the elevations and the visual, and stays with the commission through to handover.
In listed work he draws the existing fabric first: sections taken off the original skirting, architrave and glazing bars, so the new joinery is designed against what is already in the building rather than dropped into it. Those sections go to Paul as cutter profiles.
He keeps the sample library — a wall of finished boards in the real timbers and the real systems — and can usually put his hand on the exact oak and the exact colour you are describing.
Paul Sims, Technical Manager and Machinist
Paul turns the drawing into a thing that can be made. Production drawings, cutting lists, joint details, hardware schedules, and the machine settings behind all of it.
He sets out the rods: the full-size 1:1 drawings pinned above the bench, from which the makers work directly. Every job in the shop has one.
He runs the Felder spindle moulder and grinds the profile cutters. In a Grade I or Grade II* interior that is the skill the whole job depends on, because it is how a new door comes to carry a moulding that matches the eighteenth-century joinery three feet away.
Kevin Austin, Machinist and Turner
Kevin machines and he turns. Facing, thicknessing, dimensioning, tenoning: the unglamorous work that decides whether everything downstream fits.
He is also the lathe. Island legs, pot-board columns, balusters, knobs, finials, bun feet. He turns to a card template cut from the rod rather than to a dimension, so a set of four legs matches by eye and not just by caliper.
If you have seen a turned column on one of our islands, Kevin made it.
The bench: Gary Blake, Steve Bell and Jason Price
Gary Blake is our furniture maker. Free-standing dressers, tables, library and gun room pieces, anything where the work is furniture rather than cabinetry. He cuts dovetails by hand where the piece deserves it, and he is the one the others go to when a drawer is fighting.
Steve Bell and Jason Price make kitchens, cabinets and joinery, and then they fit them. They build your kitchen at the bench and they are the two men who arrive at your house with it. The maker who cut the scribe is the maker who fits it, which is why our installations take three to seven days rather than three weeks.
Both are CSCS-carded, and we carry full site insurance, so they can work on a managed site as readily as in an occupied house.
Stuart McMullan, French Polisher and Sprayer
Stuart finishes everything. Every door, every frame, every worktop, every panel, in our own booth at Mickfield.
Finishing is done in-house from start to finish. Because it is all done by the same hands in the same room, the sheen matches across a forty-door kitchen made over five weeks, and the man who mixed your colour is the man who touches it in on handover day.
He brushes out every sample on the actual door profile, never on a card. It is a small thing that stops a large mistake.
Sonny O’Keeffe, Spray Manager
Sonny runs the spray side. He came to us with years of finishing high-end fitted furniture and kitchens, which is a narrower trade than it sounds: the difference between a good sprayed finish and a poor one sits almost entirely in the preparation and the discipline, and both are habits you only build over time.
He and Stuart work the same room. Brushed work goes on trestles, sprayed work goes through the booth, and nothing leaves the building to be finished by somebody else.
Start a conversation
Tell us about the room, the house and roughly when you would like to be cooking in it. We will tell you honestly whether we are the right people for it.
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