I am often asked what attracted us to establish a business around products that people can apparently get from any DIY store?
Three reasons!
First – CHOICE, or rather the lack of it!
My wife Ally and I extended our entrance hall at home and were looking for a set of skirting boards and architraves that reflected the clean lines of our new oak door and frame. I thought this would be an easy task. Boy was I wrong!
I could get standard range of Torus and Ogee at my local DIY store but to get anything different, especially something aligned to a period style was almost impossible.
Second – CUSTOMER demand
Over the past four years, we have had continuous requests from our bespoke joinery business to make numerous one off skirting boards for fireplace installers, interior designers, decorators, home-owners (the list can go on and on). We never kept the cutters but only saved the profile as offcuts in a big box. One day a new customer came in, saw the box of offcuts and said, “I really like that can you run me 10 metres?” We of course said yes but had to go back and make all the cutters again. And so started the slow trickle to the creation of Period Mouldings.
Third – EXTINCTION of the poor cousin
Following this customer’s response we started holding, and to some extent displaying the creations we had manufactured. The result was refreshing but we realised quickly that customers need easy choice. We then set about a journey which we thought would be relatively simple.
Boy were we wrong! After two years of spending hours at the British and RIBA (Royal Institute of British Architects) Libraries we started to build up a list of possible designs that needed to be enhanced and interpreted for modern living. We supplemented this research by actual measurement of wood mouldings and designs in period homes in and around Harrogate with David Rhodes – a local architectural historian working alongside us to establish the designs that you see today on our website.
We soon came to realise that we were doing architectural history a favour. The wood mouldings, unlike the covings or windows or even stair balustrades, were very poorly recorded mainly due to their practical nature – a piece of joinery designed locally by skilled craftsmen. So we decided it was time the poor cousin of architecture came out of the closet.
To this day, we are still looking for unique designs that we can share with the public at large. In fact you could say that we are performing a public service – but maybe that’s a step too far for the poor cousin to take!