As designers and manufacturers of exquisite bespoke, furniture, kitchens and interiors, we place a great deal of importance on the quality of the raw materials and hardware that we use in our products. There is nothing worse than spending hours designing and days or weeks making something beautiful only to have it ruined by substandard constituent parts – and we won’t tolerate that for our clients either. With several decades of experience behind us, we have built strong relationships with a small number of core suppliers we completely trust to provide us with the very best their industry can offer and we felt it was time to celebrate ‘Six of the Best’.
No 3: Mundy Veneer
Sometimes, because timber is a natural material, it is not always practical to construct an item of furniture from solid wood. However, it is possible to create a much more lightweight and stable piece that looks just as good by using good quality, carefully selected veneer. Not only does using veneer enable us to produce a piece of furniture which will not move or warp depending on environmental conditions, vital in kitchens and bathrooms, but because a single log provides a large number of ‘slices’, it is possible to use the resultant beautiful grain and textures repeatedly in the same room. These can be ‘book-matched’, to provide mirror images or ‘slip-matched’ to provide a repeating pattern.
Mundy Veneer is one of our trusted suppliers of the very best veneers it is possible to buy. Established in 1998, this family business provide us with a personalised service which means that we can discuss with them the veneers they have in stock but also, if our client requires something more unusual or specific, they will often track it down specially for us. They are also strongly committed to sustainability, meaning they only buy timber from responsible sources and from countries which have policies of environmental control. When required they offer sound advice on more environmentally sustainable alternatives which we can then pass on to our clients.
Veneer is created by cutting a log into super thin slices from 12mm down to less than half a millimetre thick. There are only a small number of trees grown that are of the quality required to produce veneer and only the very best of these are selected by Simon Mundy to pass on to designers and makers like ourselves. Different methods of cutting veneers produce different effects or patterns which again can be hard to achieve with solid timber and you can read an interesting guide to different cuts of veneers on their website.
Occasionally, our clients wish to achieve a particular effect through colour or pattern and when this is the case, we will often introduce them, through Simon , to Tabu veneers. Tabu are an Italian company who specialise in dying the wood, using natural dyes, to create a very broad palette of coloured veneer from pale pastel shades to rich and vibrant tones. They have also developed a method of combining veneers in a process called multilamination to create woven or herring-bone effects. As the only UK supplier of Tabu Simon will often travel to Italy to select new products and if we have spoken to him about a specific project we have coming up, he will source the perfect veneer on our behalf.
The effect these veneers have on the finished product is stunning. Take a look at this small selection of projects that have been constructed using Mundy’s amazing high quality veneers:
Written by Bridget Pirie
You can find out more about Mundy Veneer on their website
Images of Simon Thomas Pirie Ltd projects by Double Exposure Photographic
Other images courtesy of Mundy Veneer