RURAL ARTISANS
In a Devon manor house, husband-and-wife team Takahashi McGil craft Japanese-style homeware out of logs from local woodland
Where a regular walker might pass a stack of logs and see firewood for a woodburner, Mark McGilvray sees material for a sake cup, a platter or a vase. Mark is one half of Takahashi McGil, a husbandand-wife team, who have been sculpting together in a manor house in Devon since 2016. The 16th-century building where Mark and his wife Kaori Takahashi work is surrounded by a park, and its ancient trees – ash, sweet chestnut and lime – provide a constant supply of wood. The gardener delivers branches lopped off for safety reasons and ash trees that have succumbed to dieback disease whenever he can. “Nothing is cut down specially for us,” Mark says. “It would otherwise be left to rot or used as firewood.”
NATURAL BORN SCULPTORS
Mark and Kaori met as students 20 years ago at Wimbledon School of Art (now Wimbledon College of Art). Kaori had come from Tokyo to study fine art; Mark was on a sculpture course. After graduating, Kaori worked for Armani and Mark took a job in a print shop. Mark took up woodworking mainly because the mid-20th-century furniture he wanted to buy for their home was beyond their budget. He decided to make his own, inspired by his father’s passion for cabinetmaking when he was growing up in South Africa. “I remember Dad’s workshop and the smell of the wood and the sawdust,” Mark says. “I always liked knocking bits of wood together.” After investing in a lathe to turn the legs for the furniture, he started turning smaller objects, too, such as cups and bowls – the beginning of his and Kaori’s collaborative practice. Kaori had also experimented with carving as a child, making linocut cards and carving a traditional Japanese tray at school. “It was more decorative than practical,” she says. “I enjoyed that.”
When the pair started creating together, they were unsure they could make it a full-time career, growing the business slowly. Initially, they sold their work at craft fairs and posted pictures of it on social media. Then, in 2019, they were spotted by fashion and homeware company Toast, who promoted them in their New Makers series. “We took various work for them to choose from,” Kaori says. “Mark had made a spoon with a kidney-shaped bowl just for fun and they loved it. We got a lot of orders for it, even though it wasn’t our most practical spoon.” This made the pair realise that customers were le
