Finbarr Lucas - Designer & Maker

Gallery

Here is a selection of work we have made in the last few years.

Click thumbnail images or scroll down page for details

Call 07796 626219 or email finbarr@finkfurniture.co.uk

Unit 2, Green Estate, 389 Manor Lane, Sheffield, South Yorkshire, S2 1UL  [ Map ]

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Replica Bomb-Sight

This was recently commissioned for a BBC programme, ‘Secrets of the Dambusters’, to be broadcast in the autumn.

It is a 1:1 scale model of the bombsight made by the bombers to help them drop the bouncing bomb at exactly the right distance from the dam. It’s made from reclaimed mahogany.

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Reclaimed Alcove Shelves and Cupboards

These shelves and built-in cabinets are entirely made from building joists reclaimed from a demolished post office on Abbeydale Road.

With all reclaimed work, there’s a balance to be found between damage and marks which are attractive and those which become aesthetically unpleasing and, in the case of splits and holes, impractical. The timber is very warmly coloured, with pinks, yellows and oranges providing contrast to the black nail holes and splits.

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Alcove Shelves with Multiple Spaces

These customers had seen the alcove shelves and wanted something similar but less formal and regular.

This layout of shelves was chosen from a page we drew up with three possible designs. It’s made from MDF, and all fixings are hidden from view. Any joints between shelves and wall are sealed to give the work an architectural feel.

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Creative Partnerships' Mathematics Teaching Aid

We made this piece as part of the Creative Partnerships Project Year seven technology students were closely involved in the design process. It will be used by the maths department at Firth Park Community Arts College to teach fractions and shape translation.

We worked with Mat Barry, a recent SHU graduate in furniture design, to produce this eye-catching and fun teaching resource.

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Small Hand-Carved Cross

This was a commission from a follower of the teachings of Aidan and Hilda, a Christian movement which is based on Holy Island in Northumberland.

The cross is carved from lime and is only 40mm from top to bottom.

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Sheffield Hallam University Design Resources Room

The ‘Design Futures’ department at Sheffield Hallam University commissioned us to fit out their Materials Resources Room. The brief was to create storage for a huge variety of different source materials and packaging designs which are kept in this ‘design library’,

The innovative use of materials was encouraged, and we made the worktop and shelves for plastic bins from OSB – a building material. The book cabinets above are made from locally-sourced sycamore, and their sliding doors are glazed with corrugated plastic sheeting.

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Flower Teaching Aid

Alistair Farr, manager of Clifton Park in Rotherham, commissioned us to make a flower from timber from the park itself. He gave us several pieces of different species, including lime, ash, sycamore and London plane.

The piece is a teaching aid for school groups to learn the different parts of a flower, and as such comes apart into 22 separate pieces. It stands around 150cm high. The bulb and pistil were turned by Mike Smethurst and the roots were made by Robin Dobson at Adhoc Metal.

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Bed/Side Table

This piece was made for an exhibition called ‘A Room With a View’ at the Ferrers Centre for Art and Crafts in Autumn 2009. It is a solid plywood body 55cm wide, 35cm deep and 55cm high, with a single drawer made from local beech and walnut, and a glass shelf above.

This small bed/side table, along with the coffee table below, marks a new stage in my work. I am beginning to make pieces which combine the sculptural work I make from birch plywood with the more traditional, more formal work made from locally sourced timber.

This piece is for sale at £1180. Please email us for more information.

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Curvaceous Coffee Table with Two-Way Ash Drawer

This piece was made for the same exhibition as the bed/side table above. It is a solid plywood body 120cm wide, 50cm deep and 35cm high, with a single local ash drawer which pulls out from both sides. The drawer is located in the centre of its runners by pairs of rare earth magnets.

This piece is now sold but we are always happy to discuss similar commissions.

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Botanical Gardens' Beech Kitchen

This kitchen is a combination of birch plywood cabinets with beech doors and frames. Where part of the cabinet is visible, as in the wall cabinets, this is also made from solid beech. We also fitted wany-edged shelves on two walls.

This timber came from a tree felled in the Botanical Gardens in Sheffield during its renovation. Local beech is one of my favourite timbers to work with, as it is close-grained, stable, and very beautiful.

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Sleek Sculptural Cabinet

This is by the far the most complex piece we have ever made. It incorporates storage for 168 CDs in two long drawers, and houses a home cinema system in a central maple cabinet. The door folds down and then slides into a recess below this space.

The piece is 150cm wide, 65cm from front to back, and 35cm high. The body is made from birch plywood and the cabinet and drawers are maple, sycamore and walnut. The front is veneered with book-matched pieces of burr oak veneer.

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Nappie-Changing Unit

One of the few pieces I have made for myself! This is a nappy changing unit I built when my son Aubrey was born. It is made from two different local beech trees. I chose the much paler, simpler-grained timber for the shelves as a contrast with the darker and more characterful beech which the rest of the unit is made from.

The top of this unit is removable so that it can be taken on nights away, and the unit is stocked with baskets full of clean clothes and nappies.

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Alcove Shelving in Solid Local Ash

We have fitted many bookshelves inside alcoves, and these are an example. They are made from wany-edged local ash, which unlike the plain grained commercial ash, has strong grain pattern, with dark heartwood colouring.

As with all alcove shelves we fit, the battens which hold them to the wall are secreted within the shelf itself, so that the shelves appear to ‘float’ in the space.

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School Library Cabinets

We made these six curved cabinets for Hunters Bar Junior School. They are designed to range along this open space, creating a reading area separate from the traffic of passing teachers and pupils.

Living beneath each cabinet is a specially-made wheeled trolley. If the cabinet needs to be moved, it is a simple matter to turn four Allen key fixings in the base, raising the cabinet onto its trolley and allowing it to be pushed into a new position.

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Foldaway Tables

Finbarr is stage manager at Cabaret Boom Boom, held monthly at the community centre on Fir St in Walkley.

We made ten new tables to replace the ageing card tables used by the cabaret, which were (literally) on their last legs. Using timber dried and processed by Cot-Age Child Safety, we have tweaked the original design so that the legs are locked open, removing the chance of the tables collapsing without warning!

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Display Boxes for Artist Su Blackwell

Su Blackwell is an internationally renowned artist working in paper. Finkfurniture make all her display boxes which house her beautiful book-cut sculptures.

The boxes are made from ash, and each one is unique and made to order. Depending on the sculpture it will house, the box may have a door in the side, a mirror inserted in the ceiling, or any number of other features.

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'Folksy' Logo

James Boardwell, the innovative creator of the wonderful Folksy website, commissioned Finkfurniture to make a wooden logo for a competition Folksy were running in collaboration with Howies.

The piece had to be created in double-quick time (we had 48 hours to make it!) but it was an exciting and challenging piece to create. We used oak, beech, ash and yew, and a time-lapse (see below) of the creative process was made for the Folksy website.

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Kitchen in Local Beech

This kitchen is made almost entirely from beech trees which grew in and around Sheffield. It is a beautiful local timber, so full of character and variety that the simple, solid cabinets and doors need no fancy mouldings or ornate details.

Many of the boards were so wide that we were able to make each of the door panels from a single piece of timber. These panels were chosen from pieces of beech which had spalted, creating firey, flame-like grain. The customer also designed all her own handles, and we made them from the same timber.

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Flap Mirror

Walking along the sea-front, I was inspired by seeing people's scarves flapping in the breeze.

The resulting form, made from birch plywood, is both fanciful and practical. It works well in a bathroom.

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Dovetailed Oak Cabinet

The client had a young son about to start crawling and wanted a safe place for his home cinema equipment.

We made this sleek, simple cabinet from white oak. It has hand-cut dovetail joints at all corners, toughened safety glass in the door, and is French-polished to a mirror finish.

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Crushed Shelves with Writing Cabinet

This extraordinary idea came from the client, who had bought a crush shelf from The Cupola Gallery and decided that she would like a set of bookshelves which incorporate a writing cabinet.

She wanted the work to be inspired by similar sculptural themes. The piece was a real challenge to make - more complicated than we had anticipated! - but the result is a very striking piece. It's made from reclaimed joists.

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Cherry Cherry Cabinet and Shelves

These sets of shelves on the wall are made from solid pieces of cherry. The cabinet is a birch plywood body veneered in cherry. The cabinet’s doors open with push catches, so there is no need for handles. The long door along the bottom folds down and is supported with stays.

Like the dovetailed oak cabinet these pieces were French-polished by Ross Gilbertson at Yorkshire Artspace. The quality of his work is (literally!) reflected in the mirror-finish of the surfaces, highlighting the rich, beautiful grain of the cherry wood.

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Walnut Music Stand

Musicians just love to personalize their stuff, and this client was no exception.

The resulting music stand, crafted in walnut, uniquely fits with the room's decor and features hand-sculpted adjustment screws reminiscent of a stringed instrument.

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Tree 37 Table

Tree 37 was a huge beech tree which had to be felled as it was in decline.

South Yorkshire Forestry organised a project that distributed the timber to many local woodworkers.

Finkfurniture and Treecycled worked in partnership to produce this solid beech coffee table with its distinctive 'wany-edged' central feature.

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Billow Shelf

I made this shelf as part of the Tree 37 project, where many woodworkers made pieces from the same beech tree.

I'd never tried to make a sculptural piece like this with solid timber. It required a complete rethink of the construction process. Working with this beautiful beech, with all its inconsistencies and variety, was so unlike working with commercially-sourced timber.

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Bed

This commission was wonderfully open - a bed, with drawers and shelves, made from reclaimed and reused wood.

After a few drawings and lots of thought, I realised the best thing to do was simply to get started and see where it went!

The cabinet at the head is solid ash, the drawer fronts are from a reclaimed oak headboard and the rest is a random collection of workshop materials.

This harmoniously fitted piece also provides an enormous storage solution.

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Kitchen and Worktop Made from Reclaimed Joists

Look closely at the pictures of this kitchen and you will start to discover strange features - the marks of nails, holes drilled for pipes, and extraordinary splits in the wood.

All of these point to a previous life for this timber. The customers were renovating their whole house, and asked us to design and build their kitchen exclusively from reclaimed housing joists. Even the worktop has been handmade from this recycled wood!

The doors are hung on soft-close hinges, and the drawers glide closed on dampened drawer runners. The units are all finished with an oak stain/varnish, and sealed with ECOS bare wood varnish.

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Douglas Fir Doors Make One Room into Two

The owners had recently finished a large extension to their house, doubling the size of their living room.

In order to close off one half of the space, finkfurniture was asked to make a set of sliding doors. They were built from Douglas fir (in keeping with other woodwork in the new room), and the proportions of the frame and panels were based on the existing doors. The rich nutty-red colour of the timber is set off with solid brass door furniture.

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Huge Sculptures for a Restaurant

These images show four different sculptures we made for a KFC restaurant. They are very large – around 7 or 8 feet tall in several cases, and are made from layers of birch plywood with reclaimed iroko detailing. They were a lot of fun to make – shapes such as these had been in my head for years but I’d never had the chance to make them before.

Each piece was finished by Phil Mortimer of R. Mortimer and Son, who had to get his arm into every loop and curve in order to seal the surface!

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Theta Trolleys

Used every day in the client's living room, one of these trolleys holds the TV and DVD player.

The other is an all-round footstool with space for magazines. While solid and physically unobtrusive, these pieces are visually striking.

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Handmade Oak Kitchen for an Unusual Space

This beautiful oak kitchen was made to fit into an unusually angled corner in a new extension.

Each cabinet is made from birch plywood, and all frames and doors, including the panels, from solid oak. A lot of this timber was gathered far and wide from garages and storerooms, giving a huge range of striking grain and figure to the doors, and a unique character to the kitchen as a whole.

Each door is mounted within its frame on butt hinges, and all timber is sealed with Danish oil. The final part of the project was the installation of a fitted cupboard opposite the main units, which houses the boiler, tumble drier and provides further storage.

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Splat Toilet Seat

This design is both functional and comfortable.

The extraordinary shape was a sculptural challenge to create, and the result is often remarked upon by visitors...

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Alcove Shelving and Cupboard Units

Classically proportioned alcove shelving with a solid feel.

Merryn wanted accessible storage for her books and cds, with the design in keeping with her elegant living room. The result is unobtrusive and stylish, with lots of open shelving and a cupboard below.

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Zipper Table

This little side table uses a bent plywood construction.

Bizarrely it is the only piece I make which actually involves bending plywood!

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Corner Wardrobe with a Huge Capacity

This large wardrobe holds clothes both on hangers and on shelves, many pairs of shoes, and still has room for luggage and spare bedding above.

Despite this, it is nicely invisible, built as it is in the corner of the bedroom and painted the same colour as the walls.

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Curvy Desk

Designed by the client to accommodate her new Mac, this curvaceous desktop was formed from sheets of layered birch plywood, and attached directly to the wall.

Finkfurniture also made the wheeled trolley which holds the printer and scanner.

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Architectural Shelves

The clients had recently moved to a large house built in the 1920's, and wanted a set of shelves in the living room in keeping with the style of the building.

Several ideas were discussed before this striking design was agreed upon. A feature of the design is the slatted uprights with small lights placed behind. The light from these filters through and bathes the ornaments on the shelves. These uprights then meet the main shelf to create slots for cabling to pass through.

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Wave-like Shelves and a Porthole Mirror

Matt wanted something with a watery theme for his bathroom, with a fish-eye mirror like a porthole to stare into.

We spent a while sketching and chatting about it beforehand, trying to find the right flowing shapes, and then I took these drawings away and worked from them with off-cuts and random pieces from the workshop. He was really pleased when he saw it.

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Crush CD/Book Shelf

Our most popular design, we usually have several crush shelves in stock. Made from birch plywood finished with Danish oil, each shelf is 115cm wide and holds about 70cds (on its straight edges). They are £289 each including delivery, and we can post to anywhere in the UK.

If you wish to enquire about current availability, and for international shipping rates, please contact us.

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Reflection

This mirror was a wedding present for the client's brother.

We talked about all kinds of designs, and finally reached the idea of the moon reflecting off the sea at night and the shapes the light makes on the water. The wooden surrounds are useful shelves for bathroom stuff.

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Grand Table

The client said : 'I want you to make me a new coffee table', and I told her that I'd love to, thinking for some reason that it would be quite small.

When she traced it out with her finger on the rug it was four feet wide! It was a challenge but the overall effect is startling.

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My First Piece of Furniture

This is a chair I made when I was the age in the photo, perhaps four years old. Apparently I announced I was going to make a chair, and disappeared alone into my dad's workshop in our cottage on Cape Clear Island, County Cork.

Two hours later my mother entered to find me painting this small armchair I had built. I still have it.

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