Beyond Design. The Beauty of Sustainability.

16 April 2024

Our design philosophy is rooted in more than just aesthetics, it goes deeper than the superficiality of how a piece looks and feels. Instead, it flourishes from a place of care and understanding, driven by a desire to create with integrity and honesty to achieve timeless design.

For us, sustainability is deeply entwined with these principles. In order to produce collections that stand the test of time, our focus can not only settle on the finished look of a piece; we need to start at the beginning, honouring the provenance of its raw materials and the relationships built over time to ensure its manufacturing success.

These processes of honour and respect are the founding principles of our business, along with ideals of design integrity and sustainability. But how have we successfully achieved this in an industry that is built on mass production, forecasts and trends? Our operation stands alone in its ambition to create infrastructures that allow us to grow and succeed on a leaner and more holistic model.

“The seed of our sustainability approach lives in our point of difference - being agile enough to manufacture exclusively to order. This forms the basis of our business and LEAN model; ensuring every client order, whatever the scale and specification, is created from scratch. ”

From the beginning, we have intentionally built a business that avoids cheap labour and material at the sacrifice of employee wellbeing and the environment. Instead we are guided by a deep care for processes, relationships and nature with the ambition to create a future that leaves behind only the considered pieces we create, rather than their landfill and waste.

The seed of our sustainability approach lives in our point of difference – being agile enough to manufacture exclusively to order. This forms the basis of our business and LEAN model; ensuring every client order, whatever the scale and specification, is created from scratch. This ensures every last bit of resource we take from nature is carefully and conscientiously utilised.

The process starts with respect for provenance, with most of our timber (grown and felled under strict and respectful environmental guidelines) sourced in the UK and Europe, through partnerships we have fostered for over 30 years. Only the necessary amount of timber is shipped for every order, with small leftover quantities being used in our furnaces to heat our offices and factory in Hampshire. Foam and fabric orders follow, with the same conscious consumption, ordering exclusively the amount necessary. Leftover foam is reused to create new foam, while unused fabric is donated to charities in need.

With materials in place, the order assembly takes place in our factory. Manufacturing, craftsmanship and technology combine to create a framework that supports our teams in working efficiently and sustainably, consuming the least amount of energy. Maintaining this process under our roof also ensures we not only have complete control over the build, but also bypasses the need to coordinate international shipments with high and damaging emissions.

Shipment to our clients is then organised to ensure our routes are the most efficient, a considered strategy that allows us to achieve our 4-6 week delivery lead times. We are proud of our 99.3*% delivery on time success rate, helping prove that our LEAN manufacturing model can comfortably exist alongside our clients’ project timelines.

Guided by a LEAN manufacturing process, which aims to deliver goods using only necessary resources, we set internal challenges, which demand us to constantly work to better ourselves. We only manufacture to order, we continuously work on the partner relationships we’ve built from our inception 30 years ago and we take pride in creating a business that is built upon British soil. Our conscious approach to design stems not only for a respect towards nature, but also an understanding that it is our responsibility to deliver agile, award-winning design, style and comfort with a conscience.

While many interior businesses now offer furniture created using plastic waste, we invite you to look beyond the aesthetics and be curious about the processes that have led to their creation; to understand the provenance, enquire about the richness of relationships with suppliers and question the impact that mass production can have on those very companies’ sustainability compasses. Timeless design shouldn’t just stand the test of time aesthetically, it has the responsibility to endure physically.

So we leave you with an open invite – to come and visit our factory and understand how sustainability shapes every part of our business, to talk to our design-led sales team and discuss how our ethos can help elevate your design project’s footprint or to join our CPD workshops, to learn about our sustainability credentials. Find out more about how our LEAN design process supports our sustainability and success here.

*Correct as of April 2024.