One bench. One piece at a time.
Kelpforge is a small furniture workshop under the railway arches in Bedminster. Tables, cabinets, benches and stair parts, made to commission in British-grown hardwood, with hand-cut joinery and a short list of old machines.
Most of what leaves the arch is a dining table or a run of fitted cupboards for a house in Bristol or the counties around it. A fair amount of the rest is repair work on furniture somebody's grandmother owned. Either is welcome.
Open
Enquiries taken for delivery from May 2026. Two slots remain before the summer shutdown.
Unit 6, Dean Lane Works
Bedminster, Bristol BS3 1DD
Selected work
Rudge Table
Eight-seat dining table, drawbored trestle base. Pippy oak, hard wax oil. Private house, Clifton, 2025.
Arch Sideboard
Four-door sideboard on a shaped plinth. English walnut, hand-cut dovetails throughout. 2024.
Chandos Bench
Hall bench with a shelf below, wedged through-tenons. Wych elm from a tree felled in Somerset. 2025.
What the shop makes
- Dining and refectory tables
- Freestanding and fitted cupboards
- Benches, stools and hall seating
- Desks and library shelving
- Staircase parts and handrails
- Repairs to solid-timber furniture
How the work is done
Drawings first, in pencil, at full size where the detail decides the look. Timber is chosen board by board from three merchants of long standing, and cut so the figure runs where it will actually be seen.
Joints are cut by hand where a machine would do a worse job, and by machine where it would do a better one. Nothing is stapled. Nothing is veneered onto chipboard.
Prices
A commission is quoted as one fixed figure once the drawings are agreed. Nothing is charged by the hour, and the figure does not move afterwards unless the brief changes.
As a rough guide, a six-seat table in home-grown oak starts around £3,400 and a fitted alcove pair around £2,900. Full bands are on the commissions page.
Start a commission
A rough size, the room it is going into, and roughly when it is wanted. One photograph of the space carries more than a paragraph of description. Where a job is wrong for this shop, Kelpforge says so at the first conversation rather than the fourth.
The bench telephone is 0117 496 0138, weekdays.
Page updated 8 December 2025.