Feldspar's furniture is designed to make you smile

Extremely pleasing teapots, tactile mugs, and all manner of other cosy-yet-delicate China tableware: Feldspar has spent the past decade perfecting the everyday object. Now the Devon studio is scaling up its craft, unveiling its first furniture collection at Lindsey Ingram gallery during London Design Festival 2025.

Feldspar furniture debut

A culmination of pieces developed over several years, the collection includes a dining table, side tables, a bench, a floor lamp and the possibility of a cheval mirror. All made in Feldspar’s workshop on the Devon cider farm in Dartmoor, where Cath and Jeremy Brown moved to leaving their 'unfulfilling' jobs in London back in 2016, it is a natural progression of the brand’s ethos of enduring and endearing design that makes the everyday feel special.

As with the Feldspar ceramics, all the materials used are local and sustainable. 'The wood is storm-felled and sourced from a farmer – also a family friend – just down the road from us.' Among the selection are unusual timbers with striking visual character. 'There’s some beautiful burr oak, some elm, sycamore and yew, which is amazing, like a ripple ice cream, with these big swirls through it.'

Some pieces were gifts of wood too precious to ignore. Jeremy recalls a small section of rippled sycamore 'as rare as hen’s teeth', which he transformed into a miniature bench. The new furniture carries that same spirit: finding the beauty in the materials and coaxing out forms that are as sculpted as they are constructed.

The process, however, is anything but effortless. 'The dining table has taken over a month to make,' says Jeremy. 'Obviously when you sculpt clay, it’s pretty immediate, and then you have drying and kilns. With wood, I couldn’t move my hands after sculpting the table!' He describes long days of sanding, planing and chiselling until the motions followed him into his dreams. 'You’ll close your eyes at night and you’ll just see the chisel going through the grain.'

The pressure to succeed the first time is great, unlike in ceramics, where clay can always be reconstituted. 'With wood, one slip at the very finishing stages and you can mess things up. But that length of production time really means that you get into it. You feel that piece. It has its own character.'

For Jeremy, who trained as a boatbuilder before founding Feldspar, walking the line between high-stakes precision and meditative craft is familiar. Boatbuilding demanded millimetre accuracy; furniture making demands a similar respect for material, scale and finish.

Still, Feldspar’s signature sense of play persists. Not everything is destined to be a table or lamp. Jeremy talks about making a full-sized table football set for his son, or perhaps a pinball machine one day.

Even within the collection itself, surprises abound. A heavy-looking table reveals a delicately carved underside, hidden from view until touched. A bench that looks archetypal — four legs and a seat — turns out to be 'glass smooth' to the touch.

Feldspar’s aesthetic has always had a subtle wobble to it - the look of having been drawn by a child - and that wonkiness is exactly the point. 'I’d prefer to make someone smile than think, ‘oh isn’t this clever’,' he says. 'We don’t want things to be intimidating.'

For the collection’s floor lamp – in ceramic – Feldspar partnered with Bath-based lighting designer Eloise Scotland. 'When you see her shades in real life, they steal the show,' Jeremy enthuses. 'With the floor lamp we’re using the ceramic base, a brass shaft, and then on top sits this giant fabric orb. It’s like a cool blue mist colour, very light blue, almost beige blue, with our cobalt blue running up the inside rib.'

Really it’s just a taster, the start of a conversation, says Jeremy. 'When we launched Feldspar, we planned to launch ceramics in the first quarter, and then in the second quarter get onto the furniture, and then by the end of the year there’d have been glassware and cutlery and loads of things. And, yeah, it’s taken a while to get there, but now we’re finally ready to start showing them.'

The guiding principle remains unchanged: to make objects for life that people use, rather than just have for display. But by its nature, you can’t get hold of that much storm-felled wood, so everything will be special, unique, and made to order. A production line it is not. (That said, the Browns are already fielding orders from major hospitality brands for the new designs.)

They also really do want everything to be passed on to the next generation, but even that is not enough in itself, he explains. 'It has to create a feeling. Essentially, we’re trying to create these magical moments for people in their lives. We’re serious. We’re doing it seriously, we’re doing it as well as we can with the best materials. But at the end of the day I’d prefer to make someone smile.'

Lyndsey Ingram, 20 Bourdon St, London W1K 3PJ