The Classic English Kitchen

To request a brochure, please enter your details...

Taking your project further . . .

Please phone 01509 261000 to talk to one of our designers about your project.

We will guide you through the design process, help you achieve your aims and complete your project on budget.

Helpful information about your project . . .

We are used to working from very rough drawings; it's quite possible to give you a good idea of the kitchen layout and price before accurate dimensions are known. In any case, if necessary we will visit you to check the dimensions prior to making your furniture.

However, the more information you give to our designers, the easier it is to present you with your ideal kitchen design first time round. If you can send us a dimensioned plan, any photos and a wish list, one of our designers will usually return fully dimensioned large format drawings and a quote within a few days. We are happy to make alterations to the plan, recommend appliances, discuss options for worktops, sinks, taps etc. and amend the quote accordingly. This design service is offered free of charge.

A good starting point is to prepare your wish list. This will be our first point of reference; try and indicate how you and your family would like to use the room/s and feel free to express your practical and aesthetic likes and dislikes.

The Classic Kitchen Specifications...

Our classic kitchen furniture is made exclusively from hardwood, which is all from accredited sustainable sources. We use tulipwood, an American hardwood, for the doors and fascias as well as for the carcasses and shelves of our furniture.

The doors of our furniture are mortise and tenon jointed and then planed to fit by skilled cabinet makers with years of experience. It is possible to fit doors with machine tools alone but we feel that the investment in skilled cabinet makers who can hand plane each door precisely to fit is one that is worthwhile and ultimately ensures a level of fit that cannot be achieved by any other means.

The tulipwood for our furniture carcasses is carefully selected from planned stock, which we glue together in house to create wide stable panels so that you can be absolutely certain that you will not get knots bleeding through the paint work, which is a common problem with cabinets constructed from lower quality materials. The backboards used in the construction of our classic range are random width, wide tulipwood boards, which have a traditional Georgian bead. As well as being a pleasing detail, the function of using interlocking hardwood backboards is to facilitate movement in the furniture so that the natural expansion and contraction that is inherent in timber does not cause cracks or problems in years to come.

Our classic kitchen furniture features Oak drawers constructed with traditional dovetail joints, which will ensure our drawers will still function after a hundred years of use. The presence of dovetails is generally considered to be a sign of quality in drawer construction, but we feel that just their presence is not enough. Dovetails themselves pre date written history, but it was during the Middle Ages that the dovetail became widely used in furniture due to its inherent strength. However it was during the reign of Charles II that ‘the age of the cabinet maker’ began and dovetails ceased to be purely functional and became a thing of beauty to demonstrate the cabinet maker’s skill as both a craftsman and a designer. We believe that this approach to furniture construction has great merit and we craft all of our drawers with beautifully proportioned, widely spaced joints that are a joy to behold.

Our standard drawers use traditional maple drawer runners with an application of bees wax to the runners to ensure smooth operation. We are also able to offer our oak drawers with finest soft close ‘German made’ 60kg dynapro drawer runners if preferred.

Worktops

We offer a varied selection of work surfaces, from Carrara Marble and Granite to our own hand made hardwood worktops.

We make our own worktops because there is nothing on the market that is of high enough quality. Most hardwood worktops available are glued up from narrow strips of timber, often in short lengths, which creates a parquet style surface. We love the natural beauty of traditional hardwoods and believe that the attractive figure can only be appreciated when viewing a full width plank that is perfectly sanded and finished. Our timber worktops are constructed from the widest planks available; usually Maple, Cherry or Oak, which are carefully selected to ensure that all our worktops utilise well matched, attractive boards that best demonstrate the beauty and character of that timber. We store all our timber for several months to ensure that it is stable and free from seasoning defects prior to gluing up the boards with double biscuit joints every 150mm. These measures, along with alternating the grain of adjacent boards, and offering both hard wearing lacquered finishes and natural oiled finishes, ensures that our worktops are the highest quality hardwood worktops available today.

Paint Finish

Our furniture is offered with a painted exterior and interior in a colour of your choice. We utilise water based acrylic paints, which are extremely durable. We spray paint all of our furniture, in the first instance, with three coats of paint, prior to applying a minimum of two coats of paint by brush to give a refined and subtle finish that is easy to maintain. Our painted finish is applied using Purdey brushes and long even brush strokes that follow the grain. Our hand painting team are taught to start the brush stroke with a flat, straight blade that runs exactly from the line of every joint, resulting in a hand painted finish which stands up to the closest scrutiny.

We invite all our customers to see our workshops first hand so that you can see the raw materials and the way we manufacture our furniture. We feel strongly that seeing a finished product can only tell you half the story and, to really understand the quality of the furniture that you are investing in, it is necessary to actually witness how it is made first hand.