The Farmhouse

From £45,000. What moves the number is the size of the room, the mantel, the worktop, the hardware and how much of the rest of the house we are making at the same time. A mantel and overmantel around a range is a piece of furniture in its own right and is priced as one. The design fee is £500 and it comes off the price in full when you order. You get a fixed quote before any timber is cut. Changes made before manufacture cost nothing; changes after machining cost money, and we tell you the figure before we start.

Fourteen to twenty weeks from brief to installation, and three to seven days on site, longer where there is a mantel or a run of open shelving to scribe. The long part is not the making, it is the drawing and the paint: the rod is set out full size before anything is machined, and brushed coats need time between them that you cannot compress. In an old house the survey also takes longer, because wall lengths, floor levels and lean all have to be recorded properly. Stone is templated after the cabinets are in.

Both are painted in-frame kitchens and the construction behind the door is identical. The difference is what the room is organised around. The Suffolk is drawn as a considered composition and works as happily in a London house as in a rectory. The Farmhouse is drawn around two fixed points — the range and the sink — with everything else arranged to serve them, and it brings cup handles, turned knobs, a moulded cornice on the wall cupboards and open shelving where the run turns a corner. It is a working room before it is a look.

Yes, and we would rather you kept it than replaced it to suit the drawing. The housing is drawn around the specific appliance from its own dimensioned sheet, with the clearances the manufacturer requires, rather than a generic aperture trimmed to fit on the day. Send us the model and we will work from the manufacturer’s data. Where a range is staying in place and cannot be moved, we survey around it and set the worktop line off the range and the window rather than off the floor, which is the line the eye actually reads.

A canopy hangs above the range and keeps the wall light, which suits a room that is already busy or short of height. A mantel frames the range and commits the whole elevation to it. In a farmhouse the mantel is almost always right, because the range is the centre of the room and pretending otherwise produces a kitchen that looks embarrassed by its own best feature. Ours are made as pieces of furniture in the workshop and scribed to the wall on site, with a plate shelf deep enough to be used rather than a decorative ledge.

Not if it is measured, and always if it is assumed. Farmhouse floors are laid on earth and lime, not screed; walls lean and ceilings fall away across a room. We record wall lengths at low, middle and high level, floor levels across the room, and how far the walls lean, because that number decides how deep the scribes have to be. Every carcase stands on adjustable feet and every plinth is scribed to the floor individually. The failures we get called to look at in other people’s kitchens are almost always a survey problem rather than a making problem.

Tulipwood or maple for anything that is being painted, because both take paint without the grain telegraphing through — which is what makes a cheap painted door look grainy after two years. Where a piece stays in the timber, such as a dresser, a larder interior or an island top, we use European oak, elm or iroko. Carcases are birch ply with solid backs, drawer boxes are solid timber and dovetailed, and the runners and hinges are Blum and Häfele. None of that changes between our ranges; the door is what changes.

Four coats, brushed by hand in our own prep room at Mickfield, with the final coat cut in on site after fitting so the scribes disappear. Colour is Little Greene, Farrow & Ball, or a mix made for the room, and we will match to a RAL or NCS reference where one has been specified. Two colours is the usual arrangement in a farmhouse — the dresser or the island darker than the run. Bring us a door, an offcut of skirting or the old tin and our polisher will match what is already in the house.

Ten years on our cabinetmaking, joinery and installation. If a joint opens, a frame racks or a carcase fails, we come and put it right. There is a six-month visit to adjust doors and drawers once the house has settled around the kitchen, which in an old building with a lot of seasonal movement is worth having rather than a formality. We keep parts for life, so a hinge or a runner can be replaced years later without changing the kitchen, and we supply paint for touching in.

Stone where the work happens and timber where people sit. Granite, honed limestone or slate on the runs; oak or iroko on an island or a breakfast bar. Limestone and marble will mark and patinate, and in a farmhouse that is usually an argument for them rather than against — but it should be a decision rather than a surprise, so we say it plainly. Where a household will not tolerate a mark, Dekton and the quartzes are the honest answer. We template, transport, fit and seal with our own people after the cabinets are in.

Yes, and a fireclay sink deep enough to lay a roasting tin flat is the one we specify most often. The depth is worth deciding early rather than late, because it sets the height of the front rail, the size of the drawer beneath and sometimes the position of the waste. A single deep bowl with a drainer grooved into the timber or stone is the traditional arrangement; a one-and-a-half bowl is more practical for a household without a second sink in a scullery. We draw the cabinet around the sink, not the sink into a standard cabinet.

What you actually own, measured before anything is machined. Cutlery dividers are made for the cutlery going in them, pan drawers are set out for the pans, and a larder is drawn around the jars, the mixer and the bread bin rather than to a catalogue module. Bin arrangements are drawn around the council’s collection, which sounds trivial and is the single thing clients thank us for most often. Solid oak drawer boxes throughout, dovetailed. There is no extra charge for thinking about it; there is a real cost to fixing it afterwards.

Yes, and a good deal of our work is in listed interiors — we hold Grade I and Grade II* experience. Freestanding and lightly fixed arrangements are often the route to consent, because they avoid cutting into historic fabric, and we can draw the kitchen so that fixings land in later plaster rather than original timber. We will produce the drawings and the specification your architect or heritage consultant needs for the application, but the application is theirs to make and consent is the local authority’s to give. Do not order until it is granted.

Yes. Our own team templates, transports, fits and seals — three to seven days on site for a kitchen. In an old house this matters more than in a new one, because almost every plinth, filler and cornice is an individual scribe and a fitter working to a delivery note will pack the gaps rather than cut them. The final coat of paint is cut in on site after fitting for the same reason. We do not hand the boxes to a third-party fitter and hope.

That is the usual arrangement, and it is cheaper per room than doing them separately, because the setting out and the paint match are done once. A farmhouse kitchen works far better when the mess has somewhere to go: a scullery for the second sink and the dishwasher, a boot room for coats, dogs and wet things, and a proper pantry rather than a tall cupboard called one. We are a joinery house that makes kitchens, so the rest of the house — panelling, a library, a gun room — is the same drawing set and the same benches.

It is the least fashionable of the seven ranges and the one that dates the slowest, which is the point. The kitchens of this type that survive forty years are the ones drawn for how the room is used rather than styled to resemble how such rooms are photographed. Where they go wrong is in borrowed detail — a Victorian moulding in a Georgian room, a colour chosen from a magazine and not the light in the room. We will push back on that at the drawing stage, which is the cheapest moment to have the argument.