Bespoke Furniture In Torquay
Looking for a piece that does not exist in any shop?
Freestanding tables, dressers, window seats and boot rooms, made from solid timber in our workshop.
This is the part of the workshop where people arrive with a photograph, a rough size and a piece of furniture that does not exist. A table for a room that is 2.1 metres across at its widest. A window seat for a bay in a Wellswood villa where no two returns are the same angle. A boot room for a family that comes back from Babbacombe beach covered in sand eight months of the year. We draw it, agree it with you, and make it from solid timber.
Tell Us What You Want Made
Tell us roughly what you have in mind and we will arrange a time to come and measure. A photo of the space on your phone is usually enough to start with.
The Case For It
What You Get From A One-Off
Sized to the room
Not to the nearest standard length. If the room takes a 1,940mm table and no shop sells one, that is the table we make, and you get to walk round it.
Boards chosen, not just ordered
For a visible top we pick the actual boards and lay them out for grain and colour before machining. It is the difference between a table that looks made and one that looks assembled.
Movement designed in
Solid timber expands and contracts across its width with the seasons. Buttoned tops, breadboard ends and slotted fixings let a top do that without splitting. A top screwed rigidly to a frame will crack, and usually in its first winter.
Joints that will outlive the finish
Mortice and tenon where the load is, dovetails where a drawer is going to be pulled thousands of times. Nothing structural relies on a screw and a dowel.
You see it drawn first
A scale elevation with real dimensions before we cut anything. Changing a leg taper or a drawer height on paper costs nothing.
Finished to suit the use
Hardwax oil where you want to feel the timber and be able to repair a mark yourself. Lacquer where it needs to shrug off wet glasses. We will tell you which suits the piece and the household.
- Custom Joinery Projects
- 300+ Custom Joinery Projects
- Fitted Wardrobes Built
- 100+ Fitted Wardrobes Built
- Kitchens & Fitted Furniture
- 200+ Kitchens & Fitted Furniture
- Measured Design Visit
- Free Measured Design Visit
Before You Choose
Commissioning A Piece Of Furniture
Start with the constraint rather than the picture. Almost every commission has one hard limit that everything else has to work around, and it is usually a doorway, a radiator, a window reveal or the turn at the top of a staircase. Measure the tightest point on the route into the room before you fall in love with a size. We would much rather design around a 780mm doorway than build something beautiful that has to be dismantled to get in.
Be honest about how the piece will be used, because it changes the making rather than just the finish. A dining table in a household with young children wants a hardwax oil that you can sand and re-oil in patches, not a lacquer that has to be stripped completely when it gets scratched. A hall bench that people sit on to pull boots off needs a different joint at the leg than one that only ever holds a lamp.
If the piece has a solid top, how that top is fixed down separates furniture that survives from furniture that splits. A solid timber top can move several millimetres across its width between a damp Torquay spring and a heated January, and it has to be allowed to. Buttons, slotted brackets or a sliding dovetail all do the job. Glue and screws through a fixed rail do not, and the crack that follows is not a defect in the timber.
Compared
Commissioned, High Street Or Restored
Three sensible ways to furnish a room. This is where each one genuinely wins, rather than a pitch for the most expensive.
| Commissioned | High street | Antique or restored | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Fits an awkward space | Made to it | Only by luck | Only by luck |
| Choice of timber and finish | Anything you like | What is in the range | As found |
| Lead time | 6 - 12 weeks | Days to weeks | Immediate once found |
| Repairable in twenty years | Yes, by us | Rarely worth it | Yes, that is the point |
| Typical spend | £900 - £8,000 | £200 - £3,000 | £150 - £5,000 plus restoration |
| Best for | A specific room and a specific need | Filling a space quickly | Character and patina |
Our Process
How A Torquay Joinery Project Runs
Seven stages, in this order. The one that gets skipped elsewhere is the fourth, and it is the reason a door that shut perfectly in June catches on the frame by February.
-
Visit and measured survey
We come to the house or the unit, measure the opening properly, and check what we are fixing into. Lath and plaster, solid stone, a stud wall someone put up in 1985 - it changes the fixings and sometimes the design. We take the diagonals too, because almost nothing in a Victorian villa is square.
-
Drawings you sign off
You get a drawn elevation and a plan, with real dimensions on them, before anything is priced as final. Door swings, drawer positions, where the sockets end up. It is much cheaper to move a shelf on paper than after it has been cut.
-
Timber selected and priced
We agree the species and the grade, and where it matters we pick the actual boards. Oak with heavy medullary rays looks completely different from quarter-sawn stock. The quote names the timber, the finish and the ironmongery, so you are comparing like with like against anyone else you ask.
-
Conditioning in the workshop
The timber sits in the workshop and settles towards the moisture content it will live at. BS EN 942 puts joinery for a house heated to between 12 and 21 degrees at 9 to 13 per cent. Skip this and the piece will do its moving after it is installed, in your hallway, rather than on our racks.
-
Machining and dry assembly
Cut, moulded and jointed, then dry-assembled on the bench so we find out about any problem while it is still in our building. Carcasses go together, doors are hung, drawers are fitted and adjusted. Nothing is finished until it has been put together at least once.
-
Finishing before delivery
Sprayed, oiled or hand-painted in the workshop, including the backs and the edges you will never see. Sealing five faces and leaving the sixth bare is how a panel takes up moisture unevenly and bows. Finishing off site also means no spray dust through your house.
-
Fitting and a snagging visit
Delivered and installed by the people who made it, scribed to the walls on the day. When it is in, we walk it with you and write down anything that needs adjusting. Then we come back once - usually a few months later, after your Torquay winter heating has been on - to ease anything that has moved.
Detail
Why Solid Timber Moves, And Why That Is Fine
Wood is not inert. It takes up and gives off moisture with the air around it, and as it does, it changes dimension - substantially across the width of a board, and hardly at all along its length. This is not a flaw and it never stops. A hundred-year-old oak table is still moving with the seasons.
Around Torbay the swing is worth knowing about. Relative humidity here sits in the eighties for much of spring, and a house heated properly through January can pull the air inside it a long way below that. A wide solid top will be measurably narrower in late winter than it was in May. On a 900mm oak top the difference can run to several millimetres, which is more than enough to split a panel that has been fixed rigidly at both edges.
So the design accommodates it. Tops are held down with buttons that slide in a groove, or with brackets in slotted holes. Breadboard ends are pinned in the centre and left free to move at the shoulders. Panels in a frame float in their grooves and are never glued in. Do all that and the movement happens invisibly, year after year, and nothing cracks.
It is the same principle that governs the doors on our handmade kitchens, where a floating panel in a frame is doing exactly this job.
Reassurance
What We Stand Behind
- Timber moved before it was cut
- Boards come into the workshop and sit there before anything is machined. Cutting a wide oak panel on the day it arrives is how you end up with a door that has cupped by Easter. In a bay where spring humidity runs high, that waiting period is not optional.
- Scribed to your walls, not shimmed to them
- Older Torquay walls are rarely square and almost never plumb. Every fitted piece is scribed to the actual surface on site. If you can see daylight behind a filler strip, the job was measured once and hoped over.
- Ironmongery rated for the job it is doing
- A drawer in a holiday flat gets pulled open forty times a week in August. We fit runners and hinges specified for that, and we tell you which ones we used, so in eight years you can buy the same part rather than replacing a whole unit.
- If it moves, we come back
- Solid timber is a material that responds to the room it lives in, and occasionally something needs easing in its first year. That visit is part of the job, not a callout. Say so and we will book it.
Budget
What Bespoke Furniture Cost In Torquay
£900 – £8,000
per piece
A hall bench or a small side table sits at the lower end. A large dining table in a figured hardwood, or a fully fitted boot room, sits at the upper end. We will give you a firm figure once the drawing is agreed.
Guide range only, VAT included. Your figure comes from the measured visit and the drawing you sign off, not from this page.
Full cost breakdownQuestions
Bespoke Furniture Questions
- How does the design process work?
- We talk about what you need and where it is going, then measure the space, including the route in. You get a scale drawing with real dimensions and a timber sample. Once you are happy with both, we give you a firm price and a date. Nothing is cut until you have signed off the drawing.
- How long does a piece take?
- Usually six to twelve weeks depending on complexity and on what the timber is doing. Part of that is conditioning: boards need to settle in the workshop before machining, and rushing it is how a table top cups. If you have a deadline, tell us at the start and we will be straight with you about whether it is achievable.
- Which timbers do you work with?
- Mostly English and European hardwoods - oak, ash, elm, cherry and walnut - with tulipwood or poplar for painted work. We will show you actual boards rather than a chart, because the variation within a species is far greater than most people expect and it is worth choosing rather than accepting.
- Can you copy a piece we already have?
- Usually. Send photographs and the main dimensions and we will tell you honestly what is straightforward and what is not. Turned and carved detail can be reproduced but adds time. Where the original is a family piece, we can often repair it instead, which may be what you would rather do once you have the option.
- Do you deliver and install?
- Yes, and for anything of size we deliver it ourselves rather than putting it on a pallet network. Fitted pieces like window seats and boot rooms are installed by the people who made them, and scribed to the walls on the day.
- Can you make outdoor furniture?
- We can, with the caveat that it is a different specification. Anything living outside in Torbay needs a durable timber like oak, iroko or accoya, joints designed to shed water rather than hold it, and an acceptance that it will silver unless you maintain it. Tell us where it is going and how exposed it is and we will specify accordingly.
Feedback
What Customers Say
Rated 5 out of 5
“Our bedroom is in one of the old Warberries villas and the back wall bows by about an inch and a half across four metres. Two national firms measured it, quoted, then went quiet. These came, measured, and said it needed scribing rather than filling. The wardrobes go right into the corner and there is no gap anywhere. My husband keeps running his hand down the join.”
Rated 5 out of 5
“We run a bar on the harbourside and needed the counter and back fittings replaced without losing a summer weekend. They built the lot off site, came in on a Sunday night and had us trading by Tuesday lunchtime. Knowing the whole thing was made before they ever shut our doors is what sold it.”
Rated 5 out of 5
“Sash windows on the front elevation, and we are in a conservation area so it had to be timber and it had to match. They took a profile off the original, made new boxes in accoya, and the planning side went through without a query. From the pavement you genuinely cannot tell which is which.”
Rated 5 out of 5
“Two alcoves either side of the chimney, and they turned out to be 40mm different in width, which explains why the flat-pack ones we tried first never sat right. Made as a pair but to two different sets of measurements. Small thing, but it is the difference between looking fitted and looking bought.”
Rated 5 out of 5
“We let our place out over the season so everything gets hammered. I asked them to over-specify the drawer runners and they did, and told me exactly which ones so I can order spares. Three summers in, nothing has sagged. The last kitchen we had did not last two.”
You Might Also Need
Coverage
Where We Work
Most of our work sits inside Torbay, because fitted joinery needs at least two visits and often three. Further out we go as far as the drive stays sensible - Newton Abbot and Totnes are routine, and we have taken work down to the South Hams when the job justified it.
Across Torquay
- Wellswood
- The Warberries
- The Lincombes
- Chelston
- Babbacombe
- St Marychurch
- Cockington
- Shiphay
- Torre
- Ellacombe
- Livermead
- Maidencombe
And across South Devon
- Paignton
- Brixham
- Newton Abbot
- Teignmouth
- Shaldon
- Dawlish
- Totnes
- Kingskerswell
- Marldon
- Galmpton
Or go straight to a service
Describe The Piece That Does Not Exist Yet
The jobs we like most are the ones other people have measured and walked away from. Send a photo and a rough size and we will tell you honestly whether it is worth making, and roughly what it would come to.