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Visit with Lula-James furniture

Writer's picture: Ivon HaywooodIvon Haywoood

Updated: Jul 7, 2022

I arrived back in Oxford after cycling from the first stop of my journey, a 5-hour bike ride from Matt Estela, in Basingstoke.

Andrew welcomed me into their house. This wasn’t the first time I had been welcomed by Daisy and Andrew; in late summer of 2021, I stayed with them when I was on my way to France to study Japanese joinery. Back then they were enjoying the last few months of their tenancy in the Rycotewood incubation workspace at the Sylva Foundation, where they had been for 2 years.

Since then, they have fledged from Sylva and moved into their new workshop at the Edith Road community workshops, Oxford. They are still in the gestation period since they had only been there a few weeks by the time I arrived.

It’s an endearing, small shed-like workshop, with 5 other workspaces attached. Just next to a stream off the river Thames. A family of mallards has residence there too. Vegetables growing in planters on the bank below the workshop and a grapevine climbing up the wall give the shed a fairy-tale appearance. The workshop is small but bright, with windows on all but one wall, natural light flooding the workshop. Their equipment is modest, consisting of a small bandsaw, pillar drill, 2 lathes, a handful of power tools, and of course, their hand tools. They had just installed a second-hand combination machine.



But with this equipment and their combined knowledge, skills and techniques, they are very capable makers. For example, just for Oxford art week they designed and made a Windsor-style chair, chairs are not an easy feat.

I arrived at their house on the same night that Daisy had come back from a week of filming with BBC’s Saved and Remade. This is the second season that she has been on set. That night, all of us feeling tired but full of anecdotes, we relaxed over a pint of beer in their local pub and had a good old catchup. Daisy told me about the fast-paced culture and commotion of the TV industry. The quick turnover of work that she had to fulfill in order to meet the demands of the production company, turning objects into newly imagined pieces of furniture in just 2 days. Andrew described the new workshop to me. Having just left a nurturing community like the Sylva foundation there is now a feeling of being unescorted in their new workspace. Having a community is a blessing and quickly going from that to a small space is suddenly quite lonely. Daisy and Andrew work together, but when Daisy is on set, Andrew is exposed to solitude in the workshop, which involves adjustment. But being so central to Oxford, just around the corner from Rycotewood school of furniture and a half-hour's drive from Sylva, they are never too far from help or advice from our contemporaries.


On the following Monday, Andrew and I drove to the Sylva foundation. While Daisy prepared to leave for a week of filming. Our mission was to go to collect the floor standing Lathe that they own, and use the bigger bandsaw to cut 2 components for a current project: A large television cabinet with concertina doors made of walnut veneered MDF, solid doors, and large spherical feet. I left him to do his jobs while I pottered around the foundation and caught up with some old friends who rent spaces there. When he finished on the bandsaw, we wrestled the lathe into his car and headed back. The rest of the afternoon we both spent installing the lathe, held fast with mechanical fixings to the floor, ready to receive the two large chunks of Walnut that would become the spherical feet of the TV cabinet.

This was the only day I had to spend time helping Andrew with this project, we spent a lot of time on the floor drilling into the concrete trying to create mounting holes for the lathe. I finished helping him that Monday night and spent the rest of my time in Oxford visiting Rycotewood and the Sylva Foundation. Every night I would return to their house, and we would talk about the complexities of this current project, among other things friends talk about.

Andrew had never turned a sphere on the lathe before, and he was starting with 2 spheres at 300mm diameter, each. This threw up a lot of problems; They needed to be light, but strong, in order to be able to mount the spherical blanks on the lathe. The composition of the blanks was hollow and made by gluing components together to make up the bulk of the material, rather than trying to turn a solid, unstable chunk of walnut. And if the blanks were mounted on the lathe in an eccentric fashion, the lathe could become animated and start jumping around the room. So we bolted the lathe down, and Andrew had two pre-made hollow cubes that he hoped would become the spheres.

Upon the first attempt at turning the spheres he quickly realized that a cube cannot become a sphere, or the corners would be exposed and be ruined. That night, slightly defeated, we both sat at the table and discussed a remedy to the problem. Two days went by, while I flew around Oxford on my own mission, my bike’s wheels propelling me. When I was studying in Oxford I rode a bike everywhere I went, the streets are familiar and fun to navigate, past ancient, majestic university buildings and small cobble alleyways.



On the Thursday, I found Andrew prepping the solid-wood doors of the TV cabinet, next to him on the worksurface lay 2 new blanks of walnut. This time, layers of doughnut-shaped walnut, each roughly an inch thick and reducing in diameter by the layer, the central doughnuts being the largest. A square section of walnut bridged through the centre of each blank, and would act as the spindle to which the head and tail stock would apply pressure and spinning force. This solution was brilliant and probably the best way to compose a sphere in its blank form.


It was impressive that this processing of material was achieved with a small bandsaw and a combination machine. During my week living around Andrew as he worked on this cabinet, I got an insight into how someone mitigates the problems of our day-to-day practice of furniture making. The peaks and troughs of successes, as we aim to bring a client's vision to reality. It is a hard emotional journey to be on. Going to bed one night feeling frustrated, that materials and time could be spent in vain. Having to pull ones-self up the following morning, in the hope that we might be able to remedy ourselves the next day, it takes tenaciousness. But on completion, the feelings of achievement all contribute to an overall procurement of confidence and triumph.

I saw this in Andrew when he sent me the pictures of the Walnut spheres that you see in the images below.




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