Request the Specification Book

What it is

A book, properly made. Section-sewn, linen over boards, blocked in one colour, printed in East Anglia on an uncoated stock heavy enough to take the samples. It is square, it is thick, and it will not fit through most letterboxes, so it comes in a box.

It is not a brochure. There are no lifestyle photographs of people laughing near an island. It is the nearest thing we can put in the post to standing at a bench with us.

What is in it

Timber samples, tipped in by hand. Tulipwood, European oak, hard maple and American black walnut, each planed and finished as it would be on your kitchen, so you can feel the difference between an open grain and a closed one with your thumb.

Paint samples on real timber, not on card. Colour behaves differently on a painted timber door than it does on a printed swatch, and a hand-brushed sample behaves differently again from a sprayed one. Both are in there, side by side, so you can see what the brush does to a colour in raking light.

A rod drawing, reproduced full-bleed across a spread at the largest size the page allows. This is the full-size setting-out we work from: the frame section, the door section, the reveal, the hinge, the joint. Most people have never seen one. It explains in-frame construction in about eleven seconds.

The seven ranges — The Suffolk, The Essex, The Scandi, The Kensington, The Farmhouse, The Norfolk and Modular & Freestanding — with the construction drawn rather than described.

A section on our own mouldings, with the profiles printed at full size.

Photographs of the workshop and the people in it, and drawings and elevations of finished work, including Grade I and Grade II* listed buildings.

The commercial page: what things cost, what drives the number, and the programme week by week.

Why we do not send it to everyone

It costs us a good deal more to make and post than a brochure does. The samples are cut, sanded, finished and glued in by hand at the workshop, which is an hour of somebody’s time per book, and that somebody is otherwise making kitchens.

So we send it to people with a live project: a room, a rough date and a budget that meets ours. That is not a test of worthiness, it is arithmetic. Sending two hundred books to people who are three years from building would cost us a fortnight of bench time and reach nobody who needs one.

If you are earlier than that, say so. Read the Journal, come to the workshop, telephone us with a question. All of that is free, and none of it puts you at the back of a queue. Ask for the book when the project is real and it will be posted the same week.

How to ask for one

Telephone 01449 710510, or write to hello@squareandtrue.uk, or use the enquiry form and say in the last box that you would like the book.

Tell us where the house is, what the room is, roughly when, and roughly what you have set aside. Four lines is plenty.

We will telephone you before we post it, partly to check the address and partly because ten minutes on the phone usually answers more than the book does.

Copies are posted first class. Nothing follows it: no sequence of emails, no call from a salesman, no mailing list. If you want us after reading it, you know where the workshop is.