Inside the Workshop: Sebastian Cox

On a recent trip to the UK, I was thrilled to have the opportunity to visit the zero-waste workshops of Sebastian Cox; an English furniture maker and environmentalist, whose work in wood is thoughtfully designed and made from a nature-first perspective.

I’ve followed Sebastian’s work for several years, so was excited to meet in person. Having started out in 2010, he has expanded slowly and intentionally, today running the business in partnership with his wife Brogan. With a team of 12, the couple operate a furniture workshop and studio across two large units next to the River Thames in Woolwich, southeast London, alongside a new workshop and timber mill that opened recently on a farm to the west of the city, in Kent.

Sebastian (Seb) and Brogan are warm, utterly charming and over the course of our time spent together, it became clear they live and breathe the values that they espouse professionally and personally.

Entering the light-filled workshops, the first thing you are struck by is the scent of freshly cut timber and wood shavings, with members of the team assembling furniture components, adjusting machinery or poring over a diversity of hardwoods. From unusual and characterful boards of oak, ash, sycamore and London plane, the timber is all locally sourced from sustainably managed forests in the UK. And unusually for a woodshop, there isn’t a sheet of MDF or particleboard in site.

Ethos in action

When we visited, Seb and Brogan were just finishing a large hotel project for Birch at Selsdon, crafting furniture for the communal areas, rooms, and outdoor spaces on the estate. Interestingly, Birch had also commissioned the studio to intervene in the land management, helping to convert their 230 acres - which includes a former golf course - into a site for rewilding, with a focus on native habitat recovery to boost local biodiversity.

Having employed a landscape architect, Seb says the project marks a shift in the way that clients are now working with the studio, towards a more holistic approach that bridges the gap between designer, product and their resources. The timber for the furniture came directly from the estate, it was milled by Seb and Brogan’s team, who also ensured that through biodiversity plans, the mix of tree and plant species being grown and managed at Selsdon will be balanced to maximize nature recovery ongoing.

I run my hand over a beautifully smooth board of freshly oiled ‘Pippy’ oak, peppered with interesting burrs and knot clusters, which Seb explains are due to ‘epicormic growth’ of young shoots on the main trunks of the tree.

An important part of the dialogue with clients is encouraging them to embrace the full diversity of hardwoods that grow in British forests, along with each timber’s distinctive characteristics. This is a marked separation from the straight-grained whitened oak that is ubiquitous in many modern hardwood products. The studio’s furniture ranges are elegant and honest in their design and construction, often favoring traditional but unusual details like coppiced timber shingles, cleft chestnut lathes, and strips of woven English ash.

Circular by design

“Every piece of furniture that we create comes with a carbon cost, calculated via Life Cycle Assessment,” Brogan explains. Through photosynthesis, trees take in carbon dioxide and give off oxygen as they grow, meaning timber acts as a carbon sink once the tree is felled. This carbon stays locked up for as long as the wood is in use.

By measuring the energy used in the transport, drying and machining of the timber and components, adding these together with any additional materials and finishes used, and deducting from the carbon sequestered by the timber, the studio can accurately measure the impact of a given piece of furniture. With few exceptions, their solid timber pieces are all carbon negative.

Offcuts are used in production of smaller components, while wood chips go back to the mill, to be used as fuel for the kilns to dry the next batch of timber.

The location of the new timber mill in Kent was part of a push to become resource self-sufficient, Seb mentions. An agreement to manage the farm’s 200 acres of mixed hardwood forest, will eventually provide sufficient material for the studio’s product range. But for now, the most intimate bespoke commissions involve customer's own felled trees, which may have been storm damaged or are nearing their natural life expectancy. These are milled, the timber dried, and the wood used for the client’s needs - perhaps a kitchen table or other item of bespoke furniture. The ultimate heirloom piece.

At the heart of this workshop is disruptive environmentalism, which insists that product design needs to be thought of in a more holistic way. This is truly regenerative design, and it is a vision that led to Seb being awarded the prestigious title 'Royal Designer for Industry' (RDI) last year. RDI is the highest accolade for designers in the UK, reserved for those who have achieved ‘sustained design excellence, work of aesthetic value and significant benefit to society.’

In building a design and manufacturing business that creates a positive impact, Seb and Brogan show that a traditional approach can be radical and that with a little determination and inventiveness, it’s possible to reshape models of production and global supply.

Photography: David Cleveland, Sebastian Cox