About
Sam Cooper and Richard Platt founded The Marchmont Workshop in 2020 on the Marchmont Estate, after completing an apprenticeship with the last remaining practitioner of the traditional rush chairs in the UK, before his retirement. Sam and Richard do more than keep the tradition alive, they bring their own design backgrounds to the techniques they have mastered, introducing contemporary furniture into the future lexicon of heritage craft too. Designed, in their own words ‘from tree to home’, each piece of furniture is hand crafted from local hardwoods sourced from woodlands around The Marchmont Workshop in the Scottish Borders.
Our furniture starts with the first principles of woodworking, selecting and harvesting our own materials, with every chair turned, steam-bent and finished by hand, using locally sourced and sustainably felled timber. Every chair has a light but long-lasting seat woven from hand-picked common river rushes.
We believe good furniture should last a lifetime, and by using traditional skills and techniques passed down from master to apprentice through six generations, we can achieve just that.
