Sally & Tom of Timbermill

Timbermill is a lifestyle brand offering custom furniture & fit-outs, as well as bespoke furniture and a prop rental service in the greater Sydney region. Tom Coles and Sally Taylor are the founders of Timbermill and went into business in 2013. Furniture making was always a hobby for Tom who studied civil engineering at the University of Technology in Sydney and moved into project management in construction. Sally studied interior design and spatial planning, also at the University of Technology, before settling into an early career in marketing.

Now, at Timbermill, Tom’s hobby is his full time job and Sally runs all of the other aspects of the business. Their custom furniture is handmade using primarily recycled Australian timber. Their team’s skill-set includes structural engineering, interiors, industrial design and graphic design, allowing for them to cover a broad scope of work- including pop up event design, concept design and small scale residential and commercial interior design.

Tell us about your studio & workshop; where are you based, how long have you been there, and what is your specialty or signature style?

We’re based in Marrickville in the Sydney region of NSW. We’ve got two factories here; one is for the workshop and the other is an office and storage site for our furniture hire business. Both businesses run under the same Timbermill umbrella yet operate as separately.

Our ‘speciality’ is around recycled hardwood timbers and new Australian hardwood timbers. Whilst it has evolved a lot since we started, we’ve always kept quite a similar aesthetic. We just try to make good quality, handcrafted pieces- whether it is a custom dining table or a rental item.

Tell us about the pieces you produce; what are your main influences and how did you incorporate these into the design?

The things we produce are broken up into three main categories; custom furniture (mainly hardwood dining tables, lounges, office desks etc.), activation builds (e.g. set and bar builds for marketing events) and rental furniture for our hire business. Each of these has quite a different design process.

For the custom furniture, we don’t have a particular design process but rather an overriding goal to build simple and beautiful furniture pieces. Inspiration comes from all over the place but the main influence is the timber itself, in particular the recycled hardwood. We just want to bring out the natural character in the timber as much as possible, enabling each piece to be unique.

For building rental items, it is a very different process. We design all items with a checklist in mind, involving things like how will this item be used? How much will it weigh? What maintenance is involved to keep it up to scratch? How will it manage being tied into a delivery truck? And how many parts will it have all up?

And finally, with the activation building it is whatever our client wants for the particular event – one week it’s building clear acrylic 4m x 4m balloon rooms and the next week it is a large rustic bar setup. The set building world is crazy and one we didn’t expect to end up in, but it definitely keeps things exciting.

A big part of your work is the use of recycled timber – why did you choose to go down this path? 

To be honest, when we started it was a cheaper material. Tom could get fence palings from his farm in Cooma and then, once in Sydney, started becoming friends with fencers and builders. We spent a lot of the first year of Timbermill in a ute driving around collecting fence palings off the side of the road. It has really evolved from there and, whilst we now use a whole range of solid recycled hardwood timber and speciality hardwoods, our love for recycled timber is still very strong and makes up a large percentage of all of our work.

What’s your favourite aspect of being a designer/maker? Are there many challenges?

It is an amazing job to have – there is nothing better than being able to bring an idea to life. We have found that as the business grows, we end up doing less creative stuff and more managing the team but we’re working on how to find the balance.

How do you involve the client into the design process?

In the middle of last year we launched a ‘design your own’ table offering – which allows our clients to go through a form selecting options which help ‘build’ them a table. This started after we found that most people came to us with an idea for a table but weren’t exactly sure how to get it built and what options they had. This has really helped both us and our clients to nut out a few things prior to making and help them visualise what they want.

For other custom items, generally a client comes to us with a brief or inspiration image and once quoted and approved we draw everything up. With rentals, we are our own clients which is always fun but also teaches us important lessons about what kind of questions a client needs answered.

How do you feel mass media and social platforms are influencing the furniture industry?

I think social media has opened up a whole world for smaller creative businesses, as it gives us a platform to showcase and share our work. Maybe it means that more people just get started, as you can literally just have a backyard shed and start building, take photos and post online and it can grow from there….

We haven’t found too many negatives, social media has been great for us. It has been a process in trying to find the best things to post. We are a part of a really nice industry and everyone is very supportive of one another.

What materials do you enjoy working with and why? How does manufacturing locally affect your design process and final product? 

The main materials we work with are timber and steel, they work well together. We source all of our materials locally.  Marrickville is a hub of amazing industry suppliers and most of them are within a 10km radius of our workshop. Whilst using local suppliers for everything does mean we can’t really compete in price with some of the bigger, commercial suppliers it is so important to support likeminded local business.

What can we expect from Timbermill in 2017?

A whole lot of furniture, a new business and a second residential renovation project. It’s shaping up to be the best year ever, we’re so excited and we’ve got an excellent team behind us to help make it all happen!

Head to Timbermill’s Designer Profile to see their latest furniture pieces or to get in touch with them about creating your next recycled timber furniture piece for your own home.