Some jobs come into the workshop and everyone stops to look. This was one of them.
Back in June, Djanogly Northgate Academy got in touch. They had lost a much-loved colleague, Claire, and the school wanted somewhere for staff and pupils to sit and remember her. They sent us a drawing of flowers — a whole summer border's worth, daisies and roses and a great ruffled peony — and asked whether any of it could make it into a bench.
All of it did. We carved every bloom into a solid oak back rest, each one raised out of the grain by hand, then painted them so the colour carries right across a school field. The lily is yellow, the rose is deep pink, the peony went purple, and there is a sunflower down in the corner looking out at whoever sits down.
Underneath, along the front brace, we carved two words: Claire's Chair. That is what the school calls it, and it seemed right to let the bench say so itself rather than hang a plaque on it. The legs and arms are shaped oak, left with their natural waney edges, so the whole thing looks like it grew rather than got built.
It went out of the workshop in September and now lives under the trees on the school field. Our advice for any bench heading onto grass, by the way, is to sit it on paving slabs — it keeps moisture from being drawn up into the base and adds years to its life.
We make a lot of memorial benches, and the ones that work best are never the catalogue ones. They come from a photograph, a favourite flower, a child's drawing, a scribble on the back of an envelope. We draw it up, you approve it, and then we carve it.
You can see more of this kind of work in our memorial benches collection, and the floral design shown here is now available as a made-to-order bench of your own. If you have an idea and no notion of how it would translate into oak, send it over anyway — that part is our job.
