Studio visit, Braamfontein
How a small Braamfontein studio builds oak tables with salvaged timber
The workshop sits on the second floor of a former textile warehouse in Braamfontein, a space with tall steel windows and a goods lift that still works if you hold the gate shut. Two makers share it: one handles joinery, the other does the milling and finishing. There is no CNC machine here, and no plan to buy one. Every table that leaves the floor is cut, jointed and finished by hand, which is slower than it sounds and the reason their lead times run six to ten weeks.
The oak does not arrive as clean boards. They buy reclaimed beams from demolition yards in Selby and Krugersdorp, mostly structural timber pulled out of warehouses and older commercial buildings. A beam might carry old bolt holes, checking along the grain, or a section of rot that only shows up after the first pass through the thicknesser. Stock gets stacked and air-dried for months before it is milled, because timber that moves after assembly will open a joint no amount of clamping can hold.
Following one dining table through the process, the first real decision is grain direction. Get it wrong and the top will cup within a season. They built their own jigs for the router and the domino joints, mostly out of offcuts, and they still misread grain on roughly one top in fifteen. Those tops become benches or get re-milled shorter. Nothing is thrown away, but the mistake costs a day and a half.
Quoting works backwards from the beam, not from a catalogue. They measure the rough stock, estimate yield after milling, then add the hours for joinery and the four coats of hardwax oil that finish the surface. Commissions requiring veneered board are declined now. The reasoning is simple: veneer hides the material, and the whole point of the practice is that you can see what the timber was before it became a table.
This profile is part of the current issue. Read the next studio visit in Cape Town Ceramics Without a Gas Kiln, or browse the full archive of maker interviews.
About the writer
Furniture and craft editor, Renzorodriguez
Naledi has spent the last nine years reporting on small workshops rather than showrooms. She trained as a cabinetmaker in Pretoria before moving into editorial work, which is why her interviews tend to end up in the dustier corner of a studio, next to the offcut pile and the jig shelf. For this issue she spent four days in Braamfontein watching a two-person team turn reclaimed beams into dining tables, asking the questions most profiles skip: where the timber actually comes from, how long it sits before milling, and what happens when the grain runs the wrong way.
Her work focuses on process and sourcing across South African studios, with a particular interest in makers who work without outside funding. She keeps a running notebook of demolition yards, clay suppliers and fabric merchants, and she is usually the person asking to see the reject shelf.