Do You Know Where Your Garden Furniture Comes From?

Duchy Timber's log park contains sustainably sourced timber from Cornwall, Devon & Somerset.

With modern global trade and the UK’s abandonment of manufacturing, your garden furniture could come from anywhere. Some places a lot less reputable than others.

Through global industry accreditations such as Forestry Stewardship Council (FSC) and Programme for the Endorsement of Forest Certification (PEFC), there are ways for you as a consumer to make a more informed choice when it comes to purchasing your new wooden garden furniture.

Cornwall and Devon benefit from huge areas of woodland and luckily has a well-established forestry and timber industry that can not only sustainably manage these reserves to high standards that are globally-recognised, but can also process that harvested crop into high value products for construction and agriculture as well as your home & garden.

Obviously, timber from your local community, instead of timber that has been shipped thousands of miles around the world, has far better environmental credentials. But local timber is not just better for the environment, it also gives you piece of mind that it is benefiting ancient local industries and trades. Just like the minced beef for your family’s spaghetti Bolognese this Saturday or the milk on your corn flakes this morning; buying local is good for you, your community, the local economy and the environment.

In 1958, the Duchy of Cornwall set up a sawmill at Downend near Lostwithiel. Now owned by a forester with more than twenty years industry experience, the sawmill is now one of the largest in the south west and is the beating heart of Duchy Timber Limited. Duchy Timber garden furniture, gates and fencing products are made from wood that is sustainably felled within Cornwall, Devon and Somerset and are handmade by experienced craftsmen using traditional techniques.

Down at the Sawmill

We had a really busy day at the Duchy Timber sawmill at Lostwithiel yesterday! We had a visit from the Tweet Bus and their very cute puppy Ticket!

We took them on a tour of the sawmill and thought that this was the ideal opportunity to knock something together and show you part of the processing that we do on our site in Cornwall. It's your chance to take a look at a piece of wood just at the beginning of its journey from the plantation to a piece of decking, cladding or even an item of garden furniture!

Go on, take a look and let us know what you think!
View the Video here

Duchy Timber Develop a New Home Grown Garden Furniture Range for 2013 (Part One)

Duchy Timber is an established timber manufacturing and merchanting business and we have an equally established range of products for our various markets and customers.

We have been producing quality garden furniture made from timber felled in the south west of the UK for years. It’s a concentrated range that includes picnic tables, benches, seats and a large dining table. We felt that we could expand the range by complimenting the existing items and designing new ones and, as a result, increase the demand for locally grown timber and the value added in the south west region.

It was with much interest that we noted the contents of a recent timber industry report commissioned by the Forestry Commission entitled “Opportunities to Add Value to South West Home Grown Timber – Analysing the BusinessCase”. In it, the consultants identified that:

“The best opportunities for processing more of the potentially available roundwood in the SW is to encourage and support the existing sawmills to increase production by expanding their existing markets and improving or developing new product lines.” (Forestry Commission England & South West Woodland Renaissance Partnership, 2011).[i]

This conclusion is in harmony with Duchy Timber’s strategy of adding value to home grown timber and with this call to action ringing in our ears, we got to work in 2012 concentrating on developing our value-added products, specifically our garden furniture range.

Duchy Timber Companion Seat.

In October 2012 we brought in joiner and 3D Design graduate Ian Reveley to the carpentry shop and briefed him to create a range of new pieces based on existing construction methods and the materials already available in the yard. Over the next couple of months Ian set to and created almost 30 pieces for consideration, testing and development. 

As Ian built up this large range of pieces, management and marketing were on hand to give their opinions and to make suggestions for further developments. We also sought the advice of one of our distributors; Sustainable Furniture. Some of the early pieces went through several generations of production until all involved were happy to release them onto a wider audience. Through the several generations it was clear that we were going to end up with three distinct lines within our product range. Some of the new pieces augmented our current range, the majority of them were entirely new, but fell into two very distinctive styles.

At the end of November 2012 we devised a score sheet for colleagues across the company and asked as many of them as possible to mark each item on five simple scoring points.

Guys from the yard marking the furniture prototypes.

Once we had received a good number of responses from across the company, we decided not to pursue the least popular products and by doing so ended up with a solid 13 items. These remaining pieces will go on into the next stage of our process: materials & labour cost analysis.

Stay tuned to Duchy Timber’s Blog to find out what happens next! Alternatively, go to our website to find out more about the company and its current products.

[i] Forestry Commission England & South West Woodland Renaissance Partnership (2011) Opportunities to Add Value to South West Home Grown Timber – Analysing the Business Case. Bristol: Forestry Commission.