90 devon.greatbritishlife.co.uk

Wild at HeartBelinda Dillon meets a furniture-maker whose creations celebrate

the natural beauty of wood. Photos by Beccy Strong

When Glenn White revisited timber-framed houses that he’d built,

he was struck by the contrast between the robust nature of the buildings’ construction and the crisp, straight-grained aesthetic of the interiors. “It always seemed that the furniture looked a bit spindly next to the chunky timbers,” he says.

With this in mind, coupled with a desire to encourage a reconnection with natural materials, Glenn and his wife Kelley Hann, established Whitethorn Woodcraft, enabling them to design and make the kind of furniture that revels in its origins, echoing the Dartmoor landscape in which they live and work. “I want character in wood. I want it to be real,” says Glenn. “The splits and the knots are

integral to the pieces I make, where those characteristics are allowed to be revealed rather than being sanded down and hidden.”

Glenn’s appreciation for trees and woodland began in childhood, during which he spent every school holiday camping in the New Forest, but it was his initial career in academia, where he specialized in environmental science, that spurred his move into carpentry. “It was the prolonged time spent in educational institutions that made me desperate

to work with my hands,” he says. “There was too much thinking and not enough doing.” So he booked himself on a traditional chair-making course led by renowned green woodworker Mike Abbot in Hereford, and experienced something of an epiphany.

“With any new timber I

source, I’ll know the

woodland it’s cut from, and

quite often the person

who’s cut it down”

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“For years, I’d been buying old woodworking tools for no apparent reason, and when I did the course, it all suddenly clicked into place that this was what I wanted to do. There’s a real sense of achievement in making something, having an actual end result.”

True to his training, Glenn works in a completely traditional way, using only hand tools and age-old methods. The majority of his furniture is built with no glue, incorporating mortice and tenon joints, held together with tapered oak pegs, known as tree nails, which are immensely strong. “The beauty of it is that, if you need to, you can knock the pegs out and it all comes apart – the original flat-pack furniture!”

Leaning against the end wall of Glenn’s workshop is a bed frame that epitomises the Whitethorn ethos. Made from locally grown Douglas fir, the frame is alive with patterns and texture, the grain of the wood flowing around the knots. Where Glenn has used a blowtorch to blacken the surface and then rubbed back hard with wire wool, the resulting ridges and contours of the contrasting late- and early-growth wood demand to be stroked, and you really get a sense of the life of the forest beneath your fingertips.

“I’m pleased with how the bed came out,” says Glenn, who took a blowtorch to the wood purely as an experiment. “The more time I spend with it, the more new elements I notice, such as the cracks and knots on the sides, and the end grain on the top of the posts.”

The features that Glenn considers to be the most attractive in a piece of wood are generally what causes them to be rejected by timber frame builders, meaning that there’s a good supply of material close to home. “It’s handy having a few local timber framers around for me to pilfer their firewood pile,” says Glenn, “and I’ve got a good working relationship with a lot of Dartmoor foresters and woodland timber suppliers – it’s important to keep stuff as local to me as possible. With any new timber I source, I’ll know the woodland it’s cut from, and quite often the person who’s cut it down.”

Glenn also uses a lot of reclaimed wood, such as from old barns that are being torn down. “I’m making a coffee table at the moment, the legs of which are made from an old oak staircase – it’s nice to give a new lease of life to discarded wood.”

Hearing about how Glenn works with each piece of wood, the excitement he gets from finding a “really old piece of gnarly oak”, it seems that the process is as organic as the material itself. “Rather than imposing my demands on a piece of wood, I’m letting it dictate what it wants to do. A lot of what I make, I don’t know until it’s finished exactly how it’s going to be. I’ve got a general idea, but that can change just due to the nature of the wood. It’s similar to comparing a tree that grows in the woodland to one that’s been clipped and trimmed into a certain shape; they’ve got a different feel and character. That’s what I’m hoping to bring out in the pieces that I make – the wood lived, it was something else.”

Because Glenn makes a lot of his furniture using oak that is not fully seasoned, there is the chance that new features – such as cracks and splits – will develop over time, as the wood loses moisture. It’s as if the wood continues to exert its true nature, despite being fashioned into functional forms, as if it’s letting us know that it can never really be tamed. “I’m always challenged by a piece of wood, as it’s always going to be different,” he says. And as such, each piece of Whitethorn Woodcraft furniture is unique.

Glenn moved operations to his new workshop on the outskirts of Ilsington at the start of the year, and he now has a lovely walk to and from the home he shares with Kelley and their two children in the shadow of Hay Tor. “Dartmoor is one of the most magical places for me,” he says. “It’s great to finally have a workshop here, to feel part of the Moors. Dartmoor is stark and honest; this is what nature is, and that’s what I try to show with the choice of timbers that I use.”

whitethornwoodcraft.co.uk, 07546 552 880

Dartmoor