Fairlie Furniture - Handmade Hardwood Furniture

New range of elegant dining chairs

We took delivery of a CNC machine earlier this year, in between orders we’ve been getting to grips with it and working out a new range of furniture that will take advantage of it’s mighty powers.

What does this mean for you? Well it allows us to reproduce more consistently accurate components and interesting shapes than would be possible when you are doing everything by hand. These complex shapes and curves would be extremely difficult to hand produce with accuracy – the sweep of the legs into the rails would be hard and very time consuming without cnc machining. Note though that the jointing, gluing, sanding and spraying were all done in the normal fashion.

So we can achieve a better finish and an overall more elegant chair design. It also allows us to make them more affordable for you, the customer.

The fabric in question on this sample is called Moon fabric, and it’s been upholstered by ourselves inhouse. The backrest is Scottish Elm, beautiful pieces of wood machined into that comfortable crescent shape. The chair legs are made from Amercian Ash with a black stain and lacquered finish.

You can call us on the usual number, 01475 560109 to place an order.

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Trump Turnberry Commission

We’ve previously been privileged to produce some custom pieces for the Turnberry Hotel, which we blogged about at the time. The hotel has changed hands a few times in the last few years and it was recently bought over by legendary American property tycoon, and star of the original Apprentice (before Wee Sucrose took up the mantle on our shores).

We got in touch with them when the takeover happened, just to stay in contact as the incoming owners of hotels are keen to make their mark on the new place, and it’s not uncommon in top hotels for brand new high end furniture to be replaced with even brand newer high end furniture. So knowing Mr Trump is very proud of his Scottish heritage, and given that (sadly) there are simply not that many Scottish furniture manufacturers ~~capable of producing handmade high end furniture in volume~~ left – we wanted to be in the mix.

So naturally we were pleased when they asked us to produce some custom pieces for the clubhouse. Not our usual native oak or elm, the new look of the clubhouse is very traditional so it’s made in Sapele and stained to a rich colour. These pieces are pride of place in the refurbished clubhouse.

There’s a plinth for a replica of the Claret Jug, and a concierge desk for the maître d’.

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Canadian Ensemble

One visiting customer was so impressed with the furniture on display in the showroom that he ordered half a shipping container full of furniture. This made it interesting not just for the furniture he ordered (he liked the whisky furniture with the stainless steel tensioners but wanted the casks replaced in the design), but also because it was our first order to Canada.

We get a few orders from the USA, and we have furniture on display in LA, but we don’t get that many so it’s always a novelty. The customers were a really nice couple with roots in the west coast of Scotland, and as you can see from the photos his place looks fantastic. Very Canada, the kind of place where you can imagine there’s rack of rifles by the door, the odd Moose head on the wall, and bears sniffing around the bins out the back.

He ordered a custom dining table with eight chairs, a wardrobe, cabinet and occasional chair.

Custom Oak Kitchen Island

First – a quick note. This is our kitchen island, but those are not our chairs. They were done by a company called Jarabosky based in Yorkshire, who specialise in producing furniture made from reclaimed railway sleepers (http://www.jarabosky.co.uk/ ).

This oak kitchen island was produced for a family who were completely renovating a big farmhouse style property in Ayrshire. Obviously when you have a massive kitchen you are really obliged to fill it with some fairly massive furniture or the furniture just ends up being dwarfed by it’s surroundings and looks out of place.

This kitchen island was built to their specific specification, but we also did bedroom furniture, mirrors, a mantel that went over the fireplace in the kitchen, and a worktop that went round a Belfast sink.

It is worth noting that, although it wasn’t the case in this instance, we’ve also produced bespoke kitchen islands in the past with integrated freezer drawers and fridges built into them too.

Colossus – Oak Table and Chairs with Benches

A colossal custom oak dining table which was built to order for a lovely young couple in Largs who were moving into their newly built house (presumably with a view to either having a very large family or throwing a lot of big dinner parties).

It was a ten seater, with built in cutlery drawers. It was built to very specific dimensions and positioned in a dining room which had windows on all sides and a great view right out over the Firth of Clyde. Lovely.

The table came with four benches and two handmade oak chairs for a head and the foot of the table. The photos below do it a degree of justice but in truth even the wide angled lense on the camera was struggling a bit with this table, it was so big.

Custom Yacht Table

There are many reasons why a piece of furniture would need to be custom built. One of those reasons is when you are looking for something so specific in terms of function and dimensions that there is absolutely no chance you’ll find something off-the-shelf that’ll do that job.

This always seems to be the case on yachts and motor cruisers, where the vessels themselves have been produced in such small numbers and to such a degree of variance that it’s virtually impossible to find something pre-built that you like which will fit

So we have a lovely and very bijou little table which can fold away, be turned into a chart table if required, and also has some indented glass holders so (heaven forbid!) your drink doesn’t slide off the table when you hit a bit of swell.

Thank you very much to the client for taking the time to take some lovely atmospheric candlelit photos of the table as it was about to be used for a romantic meal with a great view.

Whisky Gift Presentation Box

This one has been deliberately designed to be an ideal whisky gift box (or presentation box) to go alongside with a really nice bottle of whisky. As may may or may not know, the really high end whiskies (and by high end I mean the circa £5-£10K a bottle, 50, 60, 70 year old rare malts) tend to come in their own custom designed boxes.

Those boxes are normally designed around the presentation of the bottle itself – they are not actually all that practical and they are certainly not the most reusable. By this I mean that these top end malts will often been given their own unusual custom bottle which the box has been specifically designed to accommodate. So it won’t be able to fit a normal, or different bottle.

So we’ve come up with this – this is to cater for the market for expensive whiskies, but not the really expensive ones mentioned above. So a really nice bottle of whisky bought for a retirement present, or a fantastic bottle bought for the winner of a golf tournament. Something like that. In these cases the manufacturers seem to package the whisky in something that (to our thinking anyway) is really undeserving and underwhelming. So the idea is that you can buy a box like this to repackage your quality mid-range whiskies to make a lovely present an incredible present.

Handmade in Scotland from elm, full of rich swirling character and warm, autumnal hue. Really high quality brass hinge, set into a routered slot to keep it flush. There is no clasp or handle on it, you open it from the smooth indented ‘hole’ that’s split by the lid. Anyone who is familiar with our furniture will maybe recognise this, it’s a technique we use in drawers and cabinets for customer’s who don’t want the pure look of the wood to be compromised by a metal handle.

And as mentioned at the top, we’ve incorporated Harris Tweed into the design, not only does it look great and add a little something extra in (which is also a very traditional product, handmade in Scotland), an additional little touch of class.

Whisky Tasting Table

This table was used in big international promotion for The Balvenie as part it’s Warehouse 24 promotions. They ran a competition and the 3 winners (one from Europe, one from Asia and one from South America) each got to select a prize. We produced the three prizes, one was a cabinet, the second a chair and the third…this very special tasting table.

It’s designed as a whisky tasting table for connoisseurs of the ‘water of life’ to gather round, sip drams and discuss the ins and outs of the various whiskies. Which sounds a very civilised way to pass the evening if you ask me.

The top of the table incorporates staves from used whisky casks, they are set and fixed in position using the same special flexible waterproof caulking adhesive that gets used on the decks of yachts. Which is exactly where the idea came from, we’ve laid teak decks on yachts before and Kenny liked the idea of doing the same thing with the whisky cask staves, so that inspired the design. The sections in between the staves on the table top use other external parts of the cask wood.

As you can see from the shots below, the table has refectory style legs, and again the casks themselves are incorporated into the structure of the table.

Turnberry Hotel

Anybody who takes an interest in Golf will know about Turnberry, as the championship ‘Ailsa Course’ course has hosted many and open championships. It also has a fantastic and very famous hotel, which sits overlooking the course and the views across to Ailsa Craig.

The hotel has changed hands a few times over the last few years, it is now owned and operated by the Starwood Group who naturally had a few of their own ideas about where to take the famous brand, and how to develop the hotel. One of these involved us.

The ‘Chef’s Table’ is a V.I.P. Private room set off the main dining area with it’s own chef, waiting staff, and entertainment system. The guests basically get to order whatever they want from their chef and watch whatever they want on the telly whilst they are doing it – as you can imagine, in a 5* hotel this level of service demands a suitably high end environment to complement the overall dining experience.

The dedicated chef isn’t out of site in the kitchen, the idea (I’m not speaking from experience here, more’s the pity, so I can only outline the theory) is that the chef is able to engage with his guests, come out and tell them about the provenance of the local produce. Given it’s stature as a sporting hotel, it is also possible that the guests will want to watch golf from the television in the room whilst they eat. So for these reasons, the table Turnberry commissioned is in a (square) horseshoe shape.

It’s has been done in Kenny’s signature style, in burr elm and with the glass table tops sitting in a rebated with the natural edges visible through the glass. To complement this there is a matching bespoke elm cabinet for the television.