The Tree Bar

Every so often a job comes in that lets us tear up the rulebook, and this was one of them. A venue wanted a bar for their events — not a trestle with a cloth thrown over it, but something people would remember walking up to. We had the base of a giant sweet-chestnut stump in the yard, the kind of butt that's too handsome to burn and too big to ignore, and it turned out to be the whole answer.

We kept the bark on the outside just as the tree grew it, every ridge and fold left alone. Across the top we milled a proper worktop — flat, smooth, oiled so a spilled drink wipes straight off — so for all its wildness underneath, you've a clean surface to set a glass on. Simon welded a curved frame in black steel to carry the counter round its bend; it's the same workshop and the same pair of hands, and we cleave timber and strike an arc with much the same ease. Behind the bar went moss-edged shelving, and a back wall of bottles lit from behind so the whole thing glows green when the lights go down.

Wood, steel and a bit of theatre, all out of one workshop.

It's a showpiece, no getting round it, but it's an honest one — a real tree, milled and worked rather than dressed up to look like something it isn't. When people say "nothing is standard" they usually mean a choice of handles. This is what it means at full size: a living shape out of the woods, made to stand in a room and earn its keep.

If you've a centrepiece in mind that needs wood and metal working together, we'd be glad to talk it through.