Bespoke joinery

Having designed, specified and seen bespoke joinery for over twenty years, I wondered how to improve my understanding of the process. There are a million ways to fabricate bespoke joinery, a multitude of materials and fixings, and everyone has an opinion on how to do it. Furthermore with the plethora of social media experts and their 'hacks', it's hard to know who to listen to.

I've worked with many joinery companies over the years and have seen good and bad installations. I wanted to find the best specification for future projects and to better understand the construction process for joinery. I've understood how important this is for buildings but the same should equally apply to joinery as it makes up such a huge element in my work.

Therefore I've decided to test out my experience by trying my own hand at building some custom furniture. The purpose is better understand what works, what the problems are, what the best specification is and therefore to better inform my projects and advice to clients.

So here we go!

This is the space: a typical under stair space which has been board up and then stuffed with belongings.

This is the plan. And this is the part I've been doing for twenty-odd years, but there's a huge step from designing to fabricating, which I'm about to discover.