Gorgeous elm wood in a beautiful example of our bespoke service

If you’ve spent any amount of time browsing through our website you’ll be aware of the wide range of furniture that we sell. Our collection of Chinese antique furniture includes well over 300 pieces, the vast majority of which are held here in the UK, and our reproduction furniture ranges extend to a similar number.

In addition to these antiques and standard items though, we also offer a made to order service, which allows the customer to specify their own furniture designs for our suppliers to produce in China. In most cases this involves a tweak to one of our existing pieces of furniture – perhaps a change of dimensions to suit a particular space or use, or maybe an alternative finish. Occasionally however, we are given a slightly more complex brief, essentially to produce a completely unique, one of a kind piece of furniture to take centre stage in a customer’s home.

One of my favourite recent projects was a large cabinet that we produced through one of our regular suppliers in Beijing a few months ago. Our customer loved the rustic, natural look of our Chinese Country Furniture range but wanted a large cabinet to use in the kitchen, including an interior that would hold bottles and jars inside the doors as well as standard shelving and drawers. Over a couple of weeks we discussed the exact requirements and details, producing scaled drawings to show the dimensions and internal configuration.

With the final design agreed we put the order for the cabinet through to our supplier who put it into production. The cabinet was beautifully made by their carpenters using solid, reclaimed elm wood with a gorgeous natural finish. You can see the final result in the photos here, taken in Beijing before the cabinet was packed up for shipping. The light, pale elm wood has a beautiful, deep grain that was made more pronounced and picked out in black as part of the finishing process.  The doors were mounted on hinges fitted internally so that they were almost invisible on the outside, giving a very simple, sleek look that was perfectly complemented by the antiqued brass circular hardware. Along with the cabinet, the customer also ordered a pair of Square Trunks in the same finish, as well as several standard pieces from our Chinese Country range to match.

Kitchen Cabinet

Kitchen Cabinet Interior

Kitchen Cabinet Shelves

Elm Trunks

I hope you will agree that the final cabinet was stunning. It was installed along with the other items ordered at the customer’s home in Devon recently, though at nearly 2 metres high and in solid wood it took some delivering!

If you have a particular project in mind or would like to discuss changes to one of our standard items of furniture then get in touch and we will be happy to see if we can help. There is an additional cost involved in ordering a bespoke piece and it does take a little longer as we need to fit it into our production schedule and ship it with one of our regular containers. However at the end of the process you end up with a completely unique piece of furniture like this one that you can enjoy for years to come.