The maker
Built by hand. Built to last.
Every piece that leaves the Butterley workshop is the work of one pair of hands — cut, fitted, and finished without shortcuts.
Maker & founder
Thomas Butterley
Thomas grew up in the Derwent Valley watching his grandfather restore Victorian furniture in a shed at the bottom of the garden. That shed — its smell of linseed oil and shavings, its quiet concentration — never left him.
After training at the Building Crafts College in London, he returned to Derbyshire and set up his workshop in a converted stone barn outside Matlock. That was eighteen years ago. He has worked alone ever since, taking on a small number of commissions each year and making each piece from start to finish himself.
His work draws on the English vernacular tradition — the joinery of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries — reinterpreted for rooms that are lived in today. No veneers, no flat-pack carcasses dressed up with solid-wood fronts. Every component is solid timber, every joint is cut by hand.
How it is made
The craft
Thomas works slowly and deliberately. A dining table might take six weeks from the first mark on the timber to the final coat of oil. A cabinet, longer.
Hand-cut joinery
Mortise and tenon, dovetail, draw-bore peg — the joints that have held furniture together for centuries. No biscuits, no pocket screws, no dowels.
Solid hardwood throughout
Oak, ash, walnut, and cherry — sourced from British and European sawmills with full chain-of-custody certification. No MDF, no ply, no veneers.
Oil and wax finishes
Hard-wax oil or pure linseed, depending on the piece. Finishes that feed the wood, age gracefully, and can be refreshed at home without specialist tools.
One maker, start to finish
Thomas cuts, fits, and finishes every piece himself. There is no production line, no junior workshop. What you commission is what he makes.
Matlock, Derbyshire
The workshop
The barn sits on the edge of the Peak District, a few miles outside Matlock. It has been Thomas's workshop for eighteen years — stone walls, a north-facing roof light, and a floor worn smooth by decades of use before he arrived. The machinery is minimal: a bandsaw, a planer-thicknesser, a drill press. The rest is hand tools.
Sourcing
Timber & materials
Thomas sources his timber from two sawmills — one in Shropshire, one in the Dordogne — both of which air-dry their stock for a minimum of two years before sale. He buys in the round where possible, selecting boards himself for figure, colour, and movement. Nothing is kiln-dried to a bone-dry percentage that will crack when it meets a heated room.
Commission a piece
Thomas takes on a limited number of new commissions each year. If you have a piece in mind, get in touch — he is happy to discuss what is possible.