Woodwork in Wiltshire

Jessica Carpani meets a chip off the old block

George Winks decided to start his own woodworking company four years ago, during a holiday in the outer Hebrides. it was a few months before his 30th birthday, and with that milestone approaching, and having spent nine years working as a designer for the greeting-card company Moonpig, he saw the holiday as a way of stepping back and considering his future.

‘I went off in the freezing cold for two weeks and spent some time alone,’ he says. ‘i came up with the idea of starting my own woodworking business, partly because my father was a carpenter and i used to love spending time with him in the workshop.’

Within two months W inks had started Temper studio, which sells oak chairs, trestle tables and chop ping boards, all made in a small studio next to his home in Warminster, Wiltshire.

Winks, now 33, has since built a reputation for producing simple furniture and home war es that show off the wood grain. He employs one other woodworker but still takes great satisfaction in making the pieces himself, especially the chopping boards. He carves them in his studio, using sustainable sycamore, oak and beech from local farms, while listening to podcasts of BBC Inside Science.

It is a lengthy process, as he has to dry the wood before he can work with it. ‘The rule of thumb is a year per inch of thickness,’ he explains.

First, Winks roughly cuts a ‘manageable chunk’ of wood, a little bigger than his chopping-board template, using ac hop saw. He then files it ,‘ to make sure it is a consistent thickness’.

He cuts the wood to the correct shape using a bandsaw and a table saw, and drills a hole into it, which he will later tie with a piece of leather.

‘We then shape the edges using a hand planer,’ he says, cutting through the edge of the timber at an angle. ‘That way you can explore how the tree works.’

Finally he sands the finished piece, r ubs it with danish oil, and brands it with his company logo. ‘From start to finish it takes about 45 minutes,’ says Winks. ‘We’ve gotten very good at it.’

Nonetheless, he’s found some aspects of running his own business daunting. ‘coming from a creative rather than a business background meant that it was utterly ter r if ying at f irst,’ he admits. But he has since found an equilibrium. ‘That’s what desig n is,’ he continues. ‘Finding the balance between the aesthetic and the functional.’

Photographs by Sam Pelly George Winks, above, in his Wiltshire workshop. His chopping boards (far left) are finished with a hand plane to reveal the wood’s natural form.