RURAL ARTISAN
Meet the woodworker who talks to his timber so he can celebrate its unique character in every piece of furniture he creates
Take a close look at a chair crafted by furniture maker Ambrose Vevers and you will see the story of its construction. The gentle indents in the wood show where he has used hand tools to shape the curve of the legs or smooth out the scoop in the seat to form a comfortable hollow. Each gouge and scrape has been carried out with careful consideration. “Wood comes from a living thing, so every piece of timber is different,” Ambrose says. “You can’t force it to do something. You have to take your time and have a conversation with it.”
Ambrose has been having this conversation since childhood. His parents owned a Christmas tree farm near Ashburton in Devon and bought some woodland next door. He would roam the trees, making bows and arrows with a whittling knife. By his teens, he was constructing rustic chairs. Now 35, Ambrose still takes inspiration, as well as timber, from those trees –the connection lending him adeep understanding of the material. “When I look at a tree, I can picture which parts I will use for different things,” he says. “If the trunk of an ash tree has grown straight, it will have a grain that’s perfect for legs. In contrast, the points where the tree branches out are full of character, with the grain going in different directions, so they make good seats or tabletops.”
PERFECTLY IMPERFECT
Ambrose studied design at Falmouth University, Cornwall, when 3D printing was starting to generate a buzz. But while his peers were experimenting with computer design, Ambrose wrote his dissertation on wabi-sabi, a traditional Japanese aesthetic that celebrates imperfection, particularly in nature.
The beauty of the imperfect is evident in his designs. “I want to make things that are simple, used every day and allow the beauty of the wood to speak for itself,” Ambrose says. “I find it really exciting when Isaw a log and see inside for the first time. The knots and splits tell the story of a tree’s life. Iwant to respect that in my furniture.”
Ambrose takes some of the smaller pieces of timber from the family woodland, which he manages, keeping the larger ones standing. Other material comes from local estates, including land looked after by the National Trust. Some of these trees have toppled over in storms. Others need to be cut down because they are suffering fr
