Nick James

Edition Six Feature
Words by: Nick James
Location: Newcastle, England, UK 
Photo Credit: ©Clare Bowes Photography @clarebowesphoto

Furniture maker Nick James creates his original pieces from his studio in a thriving maker community that he set up 20 years ago. A big fan of Rubio Monocoat, Nick has been using the brand’s finishes on his products for years.

What is it that you do and how do you do it?

I design and make furniture. Probably about 65% of my work is bespoke commissioned pieces made to order specifically for the customer. It ranges from a coffee table to a boardroom table, and anything in between – I make a lot of sideboards and stools and so on.

I do a range of small products as well, which we batch produce. They’re the smaller, more popular things, which I sell on my own website and on Not on The High Street. That’s probably about 30% of my work.

The remaining 5% is the most exciting part of my job. This is the more speculative pieces that aren’t necessarily for anybody. It’s a chance to really play with ideas and stretch my creative muscles – and that’s what I get out of bed for, really.

I tend to exhibit those pieces. I usually go to the Great Northern Contemporary Craft Fair in Manchester, and the London Design Festival. It’s a way for me to play around with new ideas, but also have a chance to show new techniques to potential commissioners of my work. It’s a way to keep refreshing what I do.

Do collection pieces like your terrarium table inspire the bespoke pieces?

Yes, they’re based on the collection pieces. People will see the terrarium table and then they’ll ask for a square version or a slightly different size. That’s a good example of a speculative piece. It was a submission for an exhibition in London, and the idea was that everybody hankers for a garden in London, but space is at such a premium. I guess it’s a way for me to let people have a bit of their own green space.

It went hand in hand with the whole houseplant revolution that happened years back, when people really started to want green in their life. There are various planting options that I can offer. Some are completely maintenance-free; some are quite easy to keep, like succulents. Or there are more delicate planting arrangements that you need to nurture a little bit more.

Tell me about the table with the integral ‘cat cave’.

In the workshop, I have a team of makers who work for me. There are four of us altogether, and quite often on a Friday afternoon we will just down tools and either do something to make the workshop work better, like make some really fancy drawers for the hammers or chisels, or we set ourselves a challenge. I’m really intrigued by mathematics, geometry especially – it’s one of my guilty pleasures. We challenged ourselves to see if we could make a dodecahedron, and it became the cat cave.

A dodecahedron is one of a series of shapes called the platonic solids, which philosophers and mathematicians have used for centuries. It is quite a challenge to get the angles exactly right so that when you glue it up all the sides meet perfectly – with no gaps! Setting a challenge is a bit of fun, but it’s also a way to master the machines and the materials. As a furniture maker, I just have to work out how to bring function and how it can be a useful object. So, the cat cave came out of some playtime that we had one afternoon.

I’ve been doing this for 20 years now, and I think it’s quite easy to get into your groove and just stay there. Whereas I think it’s quite important to keep looking up and keep pushing boundaries – keep doing things that make you excited, even if at the outset they have no rhyme or reason beyond that.

And Rubio Monocoat is a product that you use regularly?

I use that on my pieces, not all of them but the ones it’s right for. It’s the Rubio Monocoat Oil Plus 2C that I use the most. I really like it because it’s quite environmentally friendly, as it’s low in VOCs [volatile organic compounds]. It’s a little bit softer than some other finishes, it feels nicer – almost like it’s not finished

The oil smells lovely and it’s quite a nice finish to work with. Because it’s a one-coat system, it means you can wax on, wax off quite quickly and get it out the door and delivered. With the amount of work that’s coming through my practice, the more efficiently we can do something, the better.

Another good thing is that it’s food safe, so I use it a lot on my kitchenware. I make plates and trays, serving platters, spoons and so on. Oil Plus 2C is both quite hardwearing and food safe, which is quite rare in a finish.

My top tip when applying the finish is to make sure you really work it into the grain, so that every part of it is covered equally, and then polish it off. I’m told that Oil Plus 2C bonds to the wood on a molecular level, which basically means you just need to get right in there and make sure that everything’s covered. That’s important.

How did your furniture-making journey begin?

I’ve always made things, ever since I was a small boy. I was encouraged to do that by my mum, who was an art teacher. I finished school and went on to do an applied arts degree, which I describe to people as being about functional sculptures – they’re beautiful things, but useful things as well. It became a priority to me that things are useful; the function is the important bit.

When I finished my degree, I found that I didn’t really know how to make anything. I’d been taught how to develop ideas and concepts, develop a narrative around my work and draw some lovely pictures, but I didn’t actually know how to make anything properly, which really frustrated me. It was the technicians at uni who would do all the dangerous bits and look after all the machines. As a self-employed maker, I was going to have to start looking after these machines myself, and I realised that I didn’t have a bloody clue.

So, I went and did a specialist furniture-making course at Rycotewood College. It was there that I learned all the important stuff, like how to sharpen a chisel properly, change a saw blade, understand how trees grow and the right way to put a piece of wood down. I learned my making skills there and then came back up to Newcastle, England, in the UK, and set up in business as a furniture maker straight away. I always tell people I’ve never had a proper job.

I was young, I had no responsibilities, so it was a good time to take a chance. There were no little mouths to feed like there are now, and there was a lot of cultural regeneration going on in Newcastle back then, with the Baltic Art Gallery, the Sage concert hall, and new museums setting up left, right and centre – back in the good old days when culture was funded properly.

What’s your workshop set-up like?

I’m based at a place called the Mushroom Works, which is a group of 16 studio spaces in an old Wesleyan Methodist chapel in the east end of Newcastle in an area called the Ouseburn Valley, which is the creative corner of the city. I actually set the place up myself when I couldn’t find a studio that was affordable and where I’d also be surrounded by other daft, creative people.

When you’re a self-employed creative person, it’s really important that there is somebody else around to talk to, someone who you can go and cry with and ask them whether that’s the right colour blue or which gallery you should be aiming for with this exhibition. I wanted that community, but there wasn’t really anywhere that had any space. Being young, daft and keen, I thought, well, I’ll just do it myself. I somehow managed to convince the bank to lend me lots of money at the tender age of 24, and I bought an empty warehouse in Newcastle.

The Mushroom Works is a community. We offer affordable studio spaces to all manner of creative professions: writers and musicians, photographers and graphic designers, ceramicists and potters, and illustrators and more. It’s about having fun, really, the whole thing. I always say you’ve just got to enjoy it, really. Because, as we’ve learned recently, life is short – enjoy your time on this planet.

Have you built up your team gradually?

Right now, I have three members of staff – two full-time makers and a part-time assistant. At times, it’s terrifying to employ three people – basically paying four people’s mortgages – but, touch wood, it’s working, as I’ve had this sort of staffing level for about seven or eight years now.

I have lots of strands to my business, which makes it viable and means that there’s always something going on. Quite often, exhibitions don’t happen, or a new range won’t necessarily take off as I’d hoped. So, it’s about not putting all my eggs in one basket.

Did it take quite a few years to decide to expand?

Yes, part of it was like letting go. Because I was the maker and I trade under my name, I thought, what happens if I’m not making the stuff? Then I realised that I am actually making it: I’m designing it and we all work together on pieces. So, as much as I am a bit of a control freak, I do have to realise that I can’t do everything, which is where my team comes in. It means we can do more things for more people, and it keeps it fun as well.

Why do you do what you do? What drives you on a day-to-day basis?

I think it’s really important to be excited by what you’re doing in life, and that’s essentially what making does for me, because there’s always a new idea or a new technique to try, or something to play with. I also think it’s really nice to be able to offer something for people to cherish. When someone comes to me and buys a sideboard – or it could be any piece, to be honest – it can be quite an investment. And it’s really nice to be able to make something that lights people’s faces up when you deliver it to them.

There’s quite a relationship between the commissioner and the maker, and that’s really important. It means that they’ll really value that object that’s been made specially for them, and they will cherish that piece and hand it down through the generations. I like to think they might anyway.

Do you have a favourite piece that you make or a part of the process that you especially enjoy?

I’m really enjoying my Danish cord weaving at the minute. Every time I make a bench, I find that I almost stop thinking about everything else and just get in this zone, making sure that the cord goes in the right way. It’s very satisfying to do, and when I’ve finished it, it’s great just to be able to stand back and see how beautiful it is. Seeing the textures and the geometric repetition in that Danish cord is just beautiful.

I quite enjoy showing people how the weaving is done, and use social media a lot – particularly Instagram – to do this. It’s important to show people that I am actually making my pieces, that it is my hands doing the work. I think that if people understand how something is made, they will realise the value of it, and not just see it as another bench that they might find on the high street.

With the benefit of hindsight, is there anything you would tell your younger self about how to set up in business as a maker?

I guess it’s just about valuing your time and what you do. As soon as you stop enjoying doing something, just don’t do it anymore – do something else that you will enjoy. I think that’s really important, and I think my enjoyment shows in my work and in my practice.

I’ve dreamed for years of having my own bit of woodland, a place where I can go and learn more about the material that I work with. In lockdown, I was lucky enough to find a piece of woodland that was just right, with a little stream and lots of different kinds of trees already growing, and just half an hour from the workshop. We bought it two years ago, and it felt like a total luxury at the time, but I’ve since realised how much it benefits my mental health, my physical health, my creativity and my practice, because suddenly I have more time to let ideas flow.

Woodland is actually quite a responsibility because it needs to be looked after and managed. To enable me to do that, I’ve now created something in my practice called Woodland Wednesday. The lads are more than capable of carrying on without me in the workshop while I go off and do woodland management every Wednesday. Sometimes I’ll do work like thinning or coppicing; sometimes I’ll just go and sit and watch the trees grow. I am planning to build an off-grid workshop in the woodland as well.