The executive dining suite for “C”, MI6’s chief, is not somewhere most people might visit or know much about. Matthew Burt does — it features his hand-carved furniture. These pieces may not be on view to the public, but the craftsman, who has been making furniture for 47 years in his studio in the misty vales of Wiltshire, has also done many public commissions — including an altar in oak staves for the church of St Thomas, Salisbury, and visitors’ benches for the Courtauld Gallery and the Ashmolean Museum. And he creates many more works for private individuals.
With a team of eight apprentices and professional craftsmen, Burt designs and makes sculptural, often curvilinear pieces — chairs, tables, desks cabinets and dressers among them — both speculatively and to commission. Distinctively, he often uses “maverick trees” with characterful markings, mostly from the UK, including tiger and bog oak, burr elm, olive ash, quilted maple and lace wood.
Some pieces have expressly historical roots, such as a “staddle stone” ash table that echoes the shape of supports once used for keeping hayricks safe from rodents. In contrast, the pippy elm and inlaid boxwood exterior of a drinks cabinet present a modern, abstract design of interlinking circles that evokes five pebbles cast in a pool of water.
The tools he uses similarly range “from the biblical to the digital”, says Burt — from old-fashioned “spokeshaves” (planing knives) to CNC machines used in automated manufacturing. When I visited, some craftsmen were busy sawing smooth staves out of rough planks from stacks arranged by species. One was adding thin strips of veneer to a cone-shaped “bucket” table in contrasting grains. A twisting sycamore trunk lay on the floor, awaiting metamorphosis.
Sustainability has been central to Burt’s approach since he began four decades ago: “We were driven by ecological reasoning even then.” After studying zoology and botany at university, Burt took up an apprenticeship to the Oxfordshire cabinet-maker Richard Fyson. In 1978 he and his wife Celia, who runs the business, bought a house in Wiltshire and constructed a studio in the back garden out of “found materials”. “We were middle-class hippies and we were skint,” he remembers. “It would be much harder to do that today.”
Burt has a scientist’s as well as a craftsman’s appreciation of the way trees are shaped by their environment. In the workshop, he points out a “wild type of oak” that had been infected with a fungus that left black lines seeping through the grain. This infection, if the tree is cut down while still alive, “turns an ordinary wood into something amazing”, he says.
Burt’s practice has recently branched out into architectural commissions, including a ceiling made of 5,500 sculpted Wiltshire ash “pebbles” that evoke the patterns in the kernel of a sunflower. He has also started on collaborations, for instance with the West Sussex-based furniture designer Katie Walker. Aged 74, he is keen to ensure that his work will have an enduring impact. We all have “a responsibility to the future”, he says. “I’ll never stop thinking about how to make it better.”
Prices from the collection from £525; lead time about 12 weeks; bespoke items take roughly five to seven months
matthewburt.com
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