A DAIRY FULL OF SAWDUST

From an old but characterful dairy in the farmlands near Baynesfield, between Pietermaritzburg and Durban, comes a range of sleek, modern and beautiful handcrafted furniture.

Cotswold Custom Made Furniture started not as a family business as such, but more as a family hobby. Richard Kaufmann’s dad, Paul, used to do woodworking as a hobby, then turned it into a small business. After an accident Paul stopped woodworking, and the dairy and the machinery sat unused for years. Richard, meanwhile, was working in the States farming potatoes, coming back for a few months every year over the Northern Hemisphere winter, our Christmas. Kicking his heels on the family farm, he wandered into the dairy parlour and began tinkering, and the process of a hobby turning into a business repeated itself. That was only a smidge over two years ago, with Richard working long hours in the dairy, making furniture by hand. Now Richard employs six other people and spends most of his time managing the growing business.

While Richard started more or less by himself, for a few months at the beginning he got some mentoring from a Zimbabwean

A dairy full of SAWDUST COTSWOLD FURNITURE IS A SMALL, PROUDLY KZN BUSINESS CRAFTING FINE FURNITURE TO ORDER, WRITES STEPHEN SMITH

ABOVE: Richard Kaufmann is growing a business started by his father. LEFT: Industrial woodworking machinery now stands where cows lined up to be milked.

carpenter who used to work with his dad. Then a business up the road that made beekeeping equipment closed down. What could have been a catastrophe for the community was actually serendipitous, as the out-of-work employees had some woodworking skills and knowledge. Richard employed a few of them, which was a bit of luck for everyone involved.

Every piece of furniture produced is made to order for a customer, be it an individual or one of the few furniture boutiques Cotswold Furniture supply. Richard comes up with the

ABOVE LEFT: The Dun Raven server has two cupboards, two drawers and even a hidden wine rack. ABOVE RIGHT: The Cluan wood and metal plasma stand. LEFT: The Preston bar stool is available in a range of timbers, with elegant metal legs. BELOW: A wooden easel.

ABOVE: The Cluan bedside table, which can be ordered with a matching headboard, or altered to suit your needs. LEFT: The Cotswold team, from left: Moosa Ntolo, Sipho Cele, Mbongi Mabena, Gerald Nqayi and Richard Kaufmann.

final design with the customer and then builds it to spec, before finishing it in the oil or colour of choice. He prefers to keep finishes minimal so that the character and grain of the timber shines through.

Richard has also branched out into some steelwork to keep up with modern design trends – when I visit there are a number of very sleek pedestals made of ash wood on black metal legs, ready for delivery.

Richard describes the style as modern, simple lines with a clean look. “One of the reasons I started doing what I do is that I fell in love with this design style on »

Instagram, and that and I spent hours looking at them. I wanted to make it.”

About 70% of the furniture is made from ash timber, but Richard regularly uses pine, saligna, oak and blackwood as well. And if a customer has their heart set on another timber, then that can also be arranged.

In terms of actual pieces, Cotswold makes furniture for just about every room in the house, examples of which can be seen on these pages as well as on the website, but Richard will also happily build something if you bring him a picture of it.

As I follow Richard around the dairy, full of sawdust, piles of raw timber and industrial woodworking machinery, I am struck by a parallel journey that the wood and the furniture take.

I mean, this is an old-fashioned dairy, a shed with dusty windows and a corrugated iron roof, a bit rough around the edges but a lovely space in which to work. The piles of timber, likewise, are rough and dusty, but the craftsmanship of the woodworkers transforms it into classy pieces of furniture with clean lines and modern inspiration. And then the furniture starts an actual journey, from the dairy filled with sawdust to the homes that will welcome these custom-made pieces, which I imagine to be bright and clean and airy, probably with minimalist lines and in trendy colours. And half of the attraction of this furniture is the journey it has

ABOVE: Mbongi Mabena, Gerald Nqayi and Sipho Cele with some recently completed furniture.

made, from a local farm where it is handmade in a real workshop by a guy who loves what he does, not mass produced in some characterless industrial factory on the far side of the world where the wood barely feels a human touch.

Remember, now more than ever, it’s so important to #shoplocal. *

FOR MORE INFO 072 838 7431; cotswoldcrafts@telkomsa.net; www.cotswoldfurniture.co.za

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