Schimmer Child have designed, built and installed a display wall for the Donna Wilson exhibition at the Yorkshire Sculpture Park.

Come the Bespoke Huts.

Schimmer Child have been asked by Cotswold Shepherd’s Huts to design and build a hut for the 21st Century, destined for boutique camping at music festivals rather than lambing on a wind blasted hillside.

The updated hut retains the cast iron wheels and familiar silhouette, but has LED lighting washing the ceiling, a fold down deck, lift-up window on gas struts and western red cedar cladding which will gradually silver in the weather.

Watch out for the Wetroom Hut and Japanese Bathing hut which will be trundling along shortly…

Stacking Douglas Fir boxes for Scottish Jewellery designer and maker Dot Sim

Schimmer Child have designed and made a budget bespoke shelving system for Music Dynamics new retail outlet. Music Dynamics has one of the largest collections of choral sheet music in Europe and also supplies a huge range of rehearsal CDs to choirs.

The angled shelves are made from a solid redwood sheet material and finished with Osmo Woodwax transparent which has turned out to be a very effective one coat finish.

We’ve been doing some design development work for Cotswold Shepherds Huts who tell us that now Spring is finally appearing – in the South at least – that many people’s thoughts are turning to the ownership of a hut for their garden, for staying in at festivals, for using as a studio. Why I wonder, do people enjoy a miniature living space so much? What makes them leave the bedroom of their large permanent structure in favour of a bedroom seperated from the stars only by softwood and tin?

From a design point of view, it’s hard to better the simplicity and effectiveness of a moveable box raised off the ground with a curved roof and corrugated iron cladding to keep the weather off the timber, but I suspect that’s not what most people are appreciating…

Writing this blogsite has made me realise just how influencial the work of Pawson/Silvestrin in the late 80s has been on mainstream interior fixtures and fittings twenty+ years later.

The floor standing bath spout is a good example – we used to have them made by a local engineer for use with wooden Japanese tubs; made by hand and then chromed, they cost many hundreds of pounds.

Two minutes searching on the web has produced the above for around £150, which is probably progress of some sort…

Discussing this it quickly became clear that dismissing it on carbon footprint grounds doesn’t work for any of us that import timber (ie. most of us), so do we embrace this or do we resist it ? Do we carve a niche for ourselves with truly bespoke pieces that need face to face discussion with the client while viewing the work or do we put aside our concerns about working conditions in China and join in?

a shed bought for housing an outhouses worth of stuff while our build was happening has now become permanent and extended to create a bike shed and wood store – so far so ordinary, except that all the timber apart from the cladding came as something else: the doors are some panelling from our old bathroom, the roof timbers were the frame the windows were delivered on, the roof sheets of ply left by the builders…Richard now has a workbench and three bicycles in there to spend many happy hours with.
Leaving aside the fact that elderly men with allotments have been doing this for years, buildings made from recycled timber are now winning awards:
sustainablecitiescollective.com/smallhousestyle/7398/reclaimed-space-takes-dwell-design-storm
so lets get those offcuts doing something useful rather than heading for landfill.

Occasional posts from a MAWIL: A Middle Aged Woman In Lycra. This is a single use acronym and only to create a context. Actually you might not want to dwell on that image.
A six mile commute from home to the office along the A419; the tedium relieved by the contemplation of slogans on vans, often when they’re very close. Example: ‘travelling miles to deliver smiles’. On a florist’s van. Did someone tell you that was a good idea or did you make it all up yourselves?
And items on the road: yesterday – single sock count:3. 3 completely different size and colour socks in 3 different locations on the tarmac. Why?