'A lifetime isn't long enough': Learning the delicate art of antique woodwork

Log beams stripe the ceilings and clever little coat hooks are made from stumps of branch.

“Sometimes the forest makes the best solutions,” says Tom Fraser, head of the Chippendale International School of Furniture.

Found in the Lammermuir Hills with sleepy Gifford village just down the way, the school’s setting is part of its charm for the 30 students who come each year to take a 30-week course in furniture making and restoration.

Its international reputation means that around half the students arrive from overseas - South Africa, Kenya, this year the first Ghanaian student, one from the Seychelles, others from Australia and New Zealand.

In 2015, Tom Fraser was a student on the course - but he hadn’t far to travel.

In fact, he was already home. He grew up in the furniture school and has taken over stewardship from his father Anselm, who founded it in 1985.

We're on a tour of the various workshops and studios when Mr Fraser opens the door to an office space.

“This was my bedroom,” he says. The ceiling still hosts a Tintin sticker stuck there in his childhood.

Anselm Fraser trained as an antique restorer before setting up his school.

It opened in East Linton before moving to Haddington, East Lothian, in the mid-1990s.

The first site was home, in its founding year, to Anselm, one student and a 15-year-old apprentice all working from a garage.

That student now runs an antique furniture restoration business in the Highlands while the teenager is a 50-something still on staff.

Tom Fraser had never expected to take over the school.

His older brother has his own woodworking business and seemed the more natural fit. Mr Fraser was working in events in the City.

However, when his brother turned the opportunity down, Tom jumped at the chance - and has no regrets.

“Even the worst day in the workshop is better than the best day in front of a computer trying to sell exhibition space to oil and gas trading providers in the Middle East,” he says.

There are weekend courses for those who just want a taster and courses of varying degrees of time and difficulty up to the school’s main draw - the 30-week course.

Students are 20 per cent school leavers, 10 per cent retirees and 70 per cent career movers.

Businessmen, Mr Fraser says, who once ran a team of 100 walk through the door and are forced to abandon their ego and start from scratch in an unfamiliar environment.

He took over in 2019, just before covid - a “baptism of fire for me” and the “unwittingly perfect time for dad to retire” - and has been working since to build on the school’s existing reputation.

“If it had been a perfect school it would have only been downhill from there but I knew that I had to bring it into the 21st century and start incorporating more modern technology.”

He introduced Computer Aided Design (CAD), 3D printing and CNC machines which are “robotic routers that can cut out millimetre perfect shapes and carvings”.

Is there part of his father that is a purist, that looks at the modern tech being introduced and feels dismay?

“Maybe a little,” he says. But the idea of the courses is to teach people how to make a living and so “you need to learn how to make a profit on a design”.

Mr Fraser adds: “It's impossible to make good money making furniture entirely by hand. That's the hobbyist luxury.”

The famous Thomas Chippendale was notoriously badly paid in his time. In fact, the historic Chippendale business was begun by a father and went bust when it was inherited by the son.

Mr Fraser tells this anecdote with an amused grimace. No pressure.

The father and son have an agreed system to ensure the relationship doesn’t break down - Mr Fraser senior gives advice only if he’s asked for it.

His mother, Antonia, works in the school too, as does his wife Sarah.

Sarah’s role includes supporting students to secure their visas - a role Mr Fraser says has become much more arduous since Brexit.

As we tour the workshops - heated with waste sawdust - Mr Fraser points out other woods and their evocative names: Sapele from Africa, walnut from North America, German steamed beech and local sweet chestnut.

Elm from Edinburgh’s Queen Street Gardens has sat drying in the stackyard for three years until its moisture content lowered to the quality needed to make fine furniture.

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“It's got little deformities and cracks and crevices that you have to work around, which gives it character,” Mr Fraser says.

There is also imported timber - ready to use but without the same character.

Mr Fraser points out some Rippled English Ash and the grain, the way it runs north to south, and its distinctive waves.

It is going to be steam bent, which is an extraordinary thing, using damp heat to turn something firm malleable.

Chunky lumps of tree branch thick with crackled bark sit on the floor.

“Sometimes you get these gnarly freak lumps that hang off the side of trees.

“To someone who's not a woodworker, they might seem like an undesirable thing but it's gorgeous.

“It means that the grain is swirling on the inside.”

Someone has engraved “percussive screwdriver” onto the side of their mallet.

It is noticeable that students are predominantly men. This year’s course has just six females and they have never attracted more than 10 women at a time - but Mr Fraser hopes that changes.

The 38-year-old has lunch each day with a different student to chat to them about their plans post-course.

The Dubai Makers Studio was an idea born at his kitchen table by a student who had pivoted from being a commercial airline pilot to opening a furniture school.

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One of the employees at the Dubai school is another former Chippendale graduate, a man from Saudi Arabia.

The school’s Meyerside Studios offer three years’ of support to students when they graduate.

We meet Andy, who graduated last summer, and is painstakingly restoring a pulpit from St Patrick’s Church in central Edinburgh.

When Anselm Fraser graduated there was no support network and “that’s a memory that he lives with,” Mr Fraser said, “And wanted to change.”

After graduation a student can rent a bench in the Studio, surrounded and supported by peers and avoiding the large initial outlay of buying equipment.

Older, more established graduates create a pipeline of work for the newbies.

“There’s a lot of support for those tackling big commissions that they are incapable of doing on their own,” Mr Fraser said.

“So it’s a nice kind of ecosystem and support network. And looking after our bodies is really important. If you put your back out carrying a thick sheet of plywood on your own, that can be curtains for a new business.”

The furniture making course has been credited by Qualifications Scotland - or the SQA as it was - for 20 years.

Mr Fraser - who quietly hopes one of his three children might take over in turn - has plans to grow the school over the next 20 years.

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For now, he’s also still learning.

“The amazing thing is that there's so much to learn in this craft that a lifetime isn't long enough,” he says.

“And I think that's a really exciting way to approach the way you learn - you should never let your ego get in the way of progressing your skill set.

“Never assume that you know it all. There will always be a newer, more innovative, more efficient way of solving the same old problems. And that's all woodworking is.

“It's problem solving to make something that's never been made before.”