Materials & finishes

Six finishes,
chosen in daylight.

We keep a short range on purpose. These six do almost everything an older Vale house asks of a kitchen, we know exactly how each behaves after ten years, and we can show you every one made up on the bench before you commit.

Portland Stone Bute Green English Oak American Walnut Welsh Slate Carrara Marble

Cupboard doors hand-painted in a pale limestone white

Portland Stone

Paint · 2 undercoats

A pale limestone white, faintly warm. Our most-asked-for cupboard colour, and the one that behaves best in north-facing Vale kitchens.

Warm enough that it never reads as a builder's white, pale enough to lift a room with one small window. It is the colour we reach for when a kitchen faces north over a yard, which in this part of the Vale is most of them.

Group: Paint
Specification: 2 undercoats
Where we use it: Wall and base cupboards, pantry interiors, boot-room joinery

A kitchen island and run of cupboards in deep estate green

Bute Green

Paint · Brushed by hand

A deep estate green kept for islands, boot rooms and dressers — dark enough to sit quietly against slate, and to hide a wet dog.

Mixed for us to a Victorian estate green and used sparingly: an island, a dresser, a run of boot-room cupboards. Against Welsh slate it disappears in the best way, and it is forgiving of the traffic a back door brings in.

Group: Paint
Specification: Brushed by hand
Where we use it: Islands, dressers, boot rooms, scullery cupboards

English Oak

Timber · Quarter-sawn · 32mm

Quarter-sawn for its figure and its stability, oiled rather than lacquered. Worktops, drawer boxes and anything that will be handled daily.

We buy English oak in the board and cut it ourselves, quarter-sawn so the medullary figure shows and the timber moves less across its width. Oiled, never lacquered — a lacquer fails at the edges and cannot be touched in.

Group: Timber
Specification: Quarter-sawn · 32mm
Where we use it: Worktops at 32mm, drawer boxes, dresser shelves, pastry ends

American Walnut

Timber · Oiled · interiors

Reserved for interiors, cutlery trays and pastry ends. It darkens with use, which is the point of it.

Kept for the inside of things — cutlery trays, spice drawers, the lining of a dresser. Walnut darkens and warms with handling, so the drawers you open every day end up the richest.

Group: Timber
Specification: Oiled · interiors
Where we use it: Drawer interiors, cutlery trays, pastry ends, tray dividers

Welsh Slate

Stone · Honed or riven

From Penrhyn, honed for worktops and riven for thresholds. Cool underhand, and it takes a drainer cut beautifully.

Quarried at Penrhyn and cut within the hour of us. Honed for worktops, riven where we want the split face to show — a threshold, a shelf in a larder, the back of a range recess. It stays cold, which pastry likes.

Group: Stone
Specification: Honed or riven
Where we use it: Worktops, drainer grooves, thresholds, larder shelves

Carrara Marble

Stone · Honed · 20mm

Honed, and only for a pastry end. It will mark and it will patinate; we will say so twice before you choose it.

We will fit marble, and we will tell you twice what it does: it etches where lemon sits, it stains where oil sits, and in ten years it will look like a baker's bench. If that sounds like a fault, choose slate. If it sounds like a patina, choose this.

Group: Stone
Specification: Honed · 20mm
Where we use it: Pastry ends only — never a full run, never around a sink

Anything else

And if you want something
not on this list?

We will make it, and we will tell you first what we know and do not know about it. There are finishes we have used once, disliked, and stopped offering — high-gloss lacquer, thin engineered stone, and any paint sold on the strength of being wipeable.

Colour matching to something you already own — a dresser, a floor, a Welsh blanket — is straightforward and costs nothing extra. Bring the thing itself rather than a photograph of it.

Deep green cabinetry with a marble-topped island

Bute Green below the worktop, Carrara on the pastry end only. The Old Rectory, Penarth.

A cast brass knob on a painted drawer front under a marble worktop

On the bench

See them made up.

Thursdays at the barn, with the samples out on the bench and daylight from the north. Bring your floor tile and your stone if you have them.

Arrange a visit See them in place