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Sylva Foundation visit; Sylva Wood Center

Writer's picture: Ivon HaywooodIvon Haywoood

At the Sylva Foundation, we can find the forests and the orchard, the school and the heritage site, the Apiary, and the House of Wessex. But it is also home to a business hub and incubation facility, named Wood Center.


Here you will find a variation of craftspeople. From furniture makers and designers to boat builders and upholsterers, all working under one roof, sustaining their own business and niche. The intention of the Wood Center is to support skill, enterprise and innovation. The building is laid out in a communal style, with a shared kitchen and recreational area, leading into an open planned hot-benching space, spanning the full length of this repurposed potato store. Multiple benches and work areas make up the space, with subsequent rooms to the right reserved for the incubation of starting businesses, one of which is currently hosting Morgan Charles, a graduate of Rycotewood school of furniture, and someone who is aiming to make free-standing furniture. Each room and space is tailored to the needs and preferences of the individuals who occupy them. The way people embellish their spaces gives you a real insight into the practices and minds of the makers. You might find tools neatly places on the wall, perhaps a drafting table in a corner, or a sewing machine for upholstery. Parallel to the incubation rooms, on the other side of the building there are some workshops for larger-scale means of production and businesses, with a common Mill. The mill is fitted with every type of machine that a furniture maker would need in their production and is common in the sense that it is shared, its kept very clean, tidy and organized.


The facilities here gave me a feeling of envy. Not only due to the quality of tooling and machinery, but mainly because of the community atmosphere of the place. It was apparent that the people who work and operate from this here have the benefit of community, like-minded professionals, and practitioners working and socializing under one roof, giving each-other support. Either in the form of reassurance, technical information, or simply help when something is too heavy to lift. Having access to community support in the place of your creative practice can provide a forgiving outlet and safety net for those days that are hard or lonesome. I witnessed this in the way that the residents of the facility engaged with one another, people were constantly moving from room to room, talking and helping one another, and sitting down for lunch together.

I was welcome to explore and chat with some of the makers who operate from within. The place is teeming with activity and with only half a day I didn’t manage to speak to everyone. But just from the few hours I had, I can tell you that there is great talent in this building. Follow this link to a page with all the makers at Sylva.




I caught up with a friend and contemporary, Richard Illingworth of Shires Studios, Richard is a ‘yes man’ when it comes to his work, he’s taken on some of the more fiddly and large jobs, the challenging ones that most other joiners or makers would turn away, making him an adaptable and malleable practitioner, and he’s got great aspirations to create another community-style furniture making core with other makers sharing space under one roof. I also caught up with Michael Buik, another Rycotewood graduate, whose work aims to tap into the market of good Scandinavian-style design, he’s been in conversation with retailers about his sturdy, flatpack furniture that uses the simplicity of a peg to hold components together without the need for glue, making the furniture easy to assemble/disassemble, store and transport and at the end of its life it can be disassembled and re-used or simply degrade naturally.



I met Stephen Hickman, a furniture maker who studied under the late David Savage, of Rowden Atelier, Stephen's highly finished arts and crafts style fine furniture is suggestive of David Savage, but I get the impression that he is currently developing his own expression. His workspace is tidy and has a display of his creations, including some abstract paintings that he had recently been working on, in order to find new forms for his next project. He proudly showed off his custom workbench and a 3 piece set of furniture he had made at Rowden with a marvelous french polish finish on rosewood veneer.

Morgan Charles, a fellow Rycotewood student and friend was happily working away in the Rycotewood incubation workshop, a space reserved for recent graduates of the school to let them foster their practice with the support of Rycote and the Foundation. Morgan had lots of finished work in his space. His style is elegantly simple using bold lines and symmetry, achieving somewhat of a Japanese aesthetic, with architectural forms and a celebration of raw timber. In his space there is an entire wall dedicated to his arsenal of tools, 10's of dovetail boxes stacked high in the corner.



I met David Leatham for the first time, a brilliant and versatile maker, we immediately gelled because of our northern roots, both being from Lancashire we recognized each other's accents emidietly.

Interestingly, Me and David had a conversation about the importance of furniture, how it shapes our lives in unexpected and subtle ways; the way we navigate a room or space in accordance with the objects in it, the layout of a space due to the furniture that occupies it can change an atmosphere completely. Furniture is necessary; tables and chairs provide communal spaces for communal activities. Furniture helps us rest, relax, store our favorite possessions and embellish our lives. We are surrounded by furniture every day and often we overlook the great service that furniture provides us as individuals and as a society. In jest, we pondered what manifestos or constitutions wouldn’t have been written if it weren’t for a table to write them on. Furniture is just one aspect in the fabric of our lives, but we grow up around furniture and we become sentimental towards it, it’s the furniture maker who knows and appreciates this the most. subtly in the undertones of our conversation there was an element of frustration, frustration about the perceived lack of appreciation towards well-made solid-wood furniture. When we (the furniture maker) conceive of an object for our audience and it isn't greeted with the same enthusiasm that we bring, it can feel upsetting given the context of our craft; we train and practice our entire lives to provide both an artistic and utility service, and we would always strive to make something to the finest degree that we can muster, with the aim to make it good enough to last generations. So, when we struggle to find work, pay for the workspace, fuel the business of furniture making, and on top of that get overlooked with the need to prove our worth, it can often feel dispiriting. This could be a result of the fast culture we find ourselves in, there is an apparent lack of understanding and education into why things are priced the way they are, why something made by hand by an individual would cost so much more than the cheap, mass-manufactured alternative. Has commodity-culture, fast-fashion, and materialism wedged a low appreciation and low price into the market? How can the designer/maker contend with a culture that expects low-cost furniture, a culture that doesn’t see the importance of something being well-made? How are we to save ourselves from falling into the trap of having to educate our client base to help them understand the hard work, practice, and high standards that we strive for? But if we don’t, we are in danger of allowing the consumer to believe that we can contend with the giants who pollute our planet and homes with bad furniture built with obsolescence.

Of course, there is a democratic need for furniture to be accessible, however, there is also a need for well-designed, made-to-last conscientious furniture that brings together beauty and utility in a materially economical way. This is a good design, and that is also a socio-political affair.

Everyone who rents a space at the Sylva workshops does so at a reduced rate, relative to the average cost of a workshop. Yet still, there is the impression that it is hard to survive on furniture making alone, many often turn to fitting furniture for a fast and abundant turnover, and others use teaching as a necessary way to supplement their careers. Thankfully the type of person that steps into this industry and intends to make a career of it is also the type of person who is strong-willed and hard-working, and above all passionate, this is one commonality among crafts-people that I have observed.

From left to right; Joseph Bray, Richard Illingworth, Phil Gullam and Morgan Charles
Me, my bike 'trigger' and some of the folks who i studied with at Rycotewood who now opperate from Sylva

Before I rode off back to Oxford I took a last panoramic look around the field of saplings, the Apiary and orchard, the Wessex house, the Sylva school, and the Wood Center, all residing quietly amongst the Oxfordshire farmland. This place is more than a furniture school or an Arboretum or center for woodwork, it’s an inspiring community hub founded around a larger appreciation for one simple material, from which a multitude of principals, professions, and experiences can be obtained, a holistic and forward-thinking place made to nurture the growth of trees, but also nurture and grow much more.


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