Oxfordshire Kitchens

As well as making bespoke kitchens in Oxfordshire, we also make other furniture such as libraries, wardrobes, tables and cabinets of all types.

We recently made a study in Oxford in an Arts and Crafts style including bookcases, a chair, a desk and side table – and a handmade sofa bed.

We design and fit bespoke kitchens all over Oxfordshire. Over the years we have fitted handmade kitchens in the North around Banbury, Chipping Norton and Bicester; in the South around Wantage and Henley-on-Thames; and in the more central areas around Oxford, Witney and Abingdon.

Our kitchens are all individually designed and they are made by extremely skilled furniture makers in our Somerset workshop. Mostly they are made with front frames fixed to the cabinets and the doors are hung on traditional butt hinges.

Sometimes, and usually for reasons of budget, we will make a kitchen without a frame which takes less time and therefore costs less. Even then our cabinets are made in a very strong and rigid manner. Our fitters always complain about their weight.

But we also sometimes make kitchens without frames for purely aesthetic reasons. In particular we like to make kitchens with veneered doors and drawers, where the figuring of the wood matches through horizontally.

The word ‘veneer’ may evoke a negative reaction with suggestions of cheapness and fakeness. In fact wood veneers are rather wonderful. They are real wood! Usually a huge bole of a tree is steamed till it is soft and then it is rotated against a sharp long knife to unpeel the veneer. Sizes and figuring in the timber become available which are impossible in the solid form. These veneers can then be pressed onto man-made substrates and, if this is done correctly, the product is stable and flat.

We firstly lip with solid timber all the edges of a panel. We then often ‘let in’ a recessed handle. We then send the panels off to our specialist veneerers having talked through exactly how we are to match through the veneers. Once pressed, we trim back the veneers and open up our handles which have been veneered over; and finally cut them to finished size.
Depending on the species of veneer chosen, the effect can range from a calm, understated look to an exhilarating pattern that is a marvel of nature.