Welcome to a reserve of extraordinary timber.

Here you have carte blanche to choose unique boards for your furniture project & to specify the way in which each board is worked in our workshop.

In addition, we provide an introduction to the finest British designers & makers of furniture whom we trust with the further working of our rare & precious boards.

WOOD

THE WOOD

In more than 40 years of log buying, sawmilling & husbandry we’ve come to understand that wood is an emotive material. The way we feel about wood is woven into and borne out of a living history of the British forestry & timber industry. This history is our cultural heritage and as such we treasure it and seek to strengthen, deepen and celebrate it, all for the sake of the glorious material humbly known as ‘wood’.

LEARN ABOUT WOOD

WORKSHOP

THE WORKSHOP

Since their felling the boards in THE RESERVE have been eased through the processes it takes to bring them to the point of use.

Now they have arrived. They’re ready to use, but we don’t let them sit gathering dust.
Once Hillgrove boards have been selected and put aside we spend time on them. We take away the weathered surface with a light plane and sand to expose the colour, grain and individual characteristics. In this way you can make your choice of board more easily.

But our ability to work on your boards doesn’t end there…

DISCOVER THE WORKSHOP

MAKERS

THE MAKERS

So you have found a piece of wood in THE RESERVE that tugs at your aesthetic sensibilities. It fits your vision of what special wood should be and you know how you want to use it.

Now you need a maker.

Choosing a maker is about finding a woodworker you can work with, someone on your wavelength, someone who understands your vision and knows how to translate that into reality.

MEET THE MAKERS

RESERVE

THE RESERVE

Here we present our most treasured, our most rare, our most valuable and our most sought after boards. From enormous volumes of waney edge boules we choose individual boards, book-matched pairs of boards and sometimes whole boules that we feel warrant our attention.

Perhaps we know them to be of special historical provenance, perhaps they display never before-seen figure and grain, sometimes they have been growing for centuries and their dimensions are now enormous and thus rare. These particular boards cannot be allowed to enter the realm of everyday woodworking and so have been withdrawn from availability, and thus they are ‘reserved’.

They are unique and precious and we will continue to hold them apart until they meet with their destined maker to become a thing of beauty.

VIEW THE RESERVE BOARDS