The makers.

One workshop, nine people

Square & True is the kitchen work of Reeve & Co Interiors, a family joinery house founded in 2015. There are nine of us at Stonham Road, Mickfield.

That is the whole company. No design studio in one county and a factory in another, no subcontract crews, no white-labeled carcasses arriving flat-packed. Everything is drawn, machined, assembled, finished and fitted by the people below.

It also means you will meet most of them. Clients come to the workshop by appointment, usually once during machining and once during finishing.

Torben Reeve, founder and director

Torben started the company in 2015 and still prices every job himself. If you call about a kitchen there is a good chance he answers.

He is the one who will tell you, early and without ceremony, that your budget and your brief do not meet, or that the island you want is a foot too long for the room to work around. Most people find that useful about a week later.

He signs off every cutting list before timber is ordered. It is the last point at which a mistake is free.

Oliver Manning, design manager

Oliver runs the design side. He does your survey, draws the job in SolidWorks, produces the elevations and the visual, and stays with the commission through to handover.

In historic work he draws the existing fabric first: sections taken off the original baseboard, casing and glazing bars, so the new joinery is designed against what is already in the building rather than dropped into it. Those sections go to Paul as cutter profiles.

He keeps the sample library — a wall of finished boards in the real timbers and the real systems — and can usually put his hand on the exact oak and the exact color you are describing.

Paul Sims, technical manager and machinist

Paul turns the drawing into a thing that can be made. Production drawings, cutting lists, joint details, hardware schedules, and the machine settings behind all of it.

He sets out the rods: the full-size drawings pinned above the bench, from which the makers work directly. Every job in the shop has one.

He runs the Felder spindle molder and grinds the profile cutters. In a landmarked interior that is the skill the whole job depends on, because it is how a new door comes to carry a molding that matches the eighteenth-century joinery three feet away.

Kevin Austin, machinist and turner

Kevin machines and he turns. Facing, thicknessing, dimensioning, tenoning: the unglamorous work that decides whether everything downstream fits.

He is also the lathe. Island legs, pot-board columns, balusters, knobs, finials, bun feet. He turns to a card template cut from the rod rather than to a dimension, so a set of four legs matches by eye and not just by caliper.

If you have seen a turned column on one of our islands, Kevin made it.

The bench: Gary Blake, Steve Bell and Jason Price

Gary Blake is our furniture maker. Freestanding dressers, tables, library and gun room pieces, anything where the work is furniture rather than cabinetry. He cuts dovetails by hand where the piece deserves it, and he is the one the others go to when a drawer is fighting.

Steve Bell and Jason Price make kitchens, cabinets and joinery, and then they fit them. They build your kitchen at the bench and they are the men who arrive at your house with it. The maker who cut the scribe is the maker who fits it, which is why our installations take three to seven days rather than three weeks.

We carry full insurance, so they can work on a managed site as readily as in an occupied house.

Stuart McMullan, French polisher

Stuart finishes everything. Every door, every frame, every countertop, every panel, in our own booth at Mickfield.

Because it is all done by the same hands in the same room, the sheen matches across a forty-door kitchen made over five weeks, and the man who mixed your color is the man who touches it in on handover day.

He brushes out every sample on the actual door profile, never on a card. It is a small thing that stops a large mistake.

Sonny O’Keeffe, spray manager

Sonny runs the spray side. He came to us with years of finishing high-end fitted furniture and kitchens, which is a narrower trade than it sounds: the difference between a good sprayed finish and a poor one sits almost entirely in the preparation and the discipline, and both are habits you only build over time.

He and Stuart work the same room. Brushed work goes on trestles, sprayed work goes through the booth, and nothing leaves the building to be finished by somebody else.

Come and meet them →   How we make it →   Why English cabinetmaking →