Meet the Team: Ben Smith
To kick off our ‘Meet the Team’ series, I sat down with Ben Smith, Pluck’s Senior Cabinet Maker. Over coffee, with the familiar hum of the workshop just behind us, Ben talks about finding carpentry after a very different career post university, the realities of retraining, the joy of collaborative making, and the quiet thrill of solving a tricky design problem. We also discuss Ben’s passion for food including his love for pasta and communal eating because, as it turns out, good making and good cooking have more in common than you might think.
L: Were you always drawn to carpentry?
B: Far from it! I actually studied Philosophy at university. After graduating, I worked for various charities and then for the Financial Ombudsman. I didn’t really love being behind a desk and started thinking about careers where I could do something more practical. I’d never explored woodwork before, but the more I looked into it, the more it interested me.
L: How did you go about making the change?
B: I tried a few evening courses first, and then worked part-time for a while to get more of a feel for what a career making things would look like. I quickly realised I needed proper training to be useful in the workshop, and so went back to work full-time to save money for a two-year Furniture Making course at The Building Crafts College in London. The first year was about learning bench joinery- understanding the basic joinery techniques, using hand tools and marking out joints. In the second year, we got to design and make our own furniture. I worked at a climbing gym on Saturdays to have some income. It was a liberating (and slightly scary!) time.
L: Was it hard choosing a course?
B: I’m from London, so the location of the Building Crafts College was good and I liked the focus on practical skills that the course offered. They also had quite a bit of funding for the course available at the time. There weren’t many practically focused furniture-making courses available, and I felt lucky to get into one that was exactly what I was looking for.
As well as the Building Crafts College, Sylva Wood School also has a really impressive furniture making course, although it wasn’t around when I was retraining. I’ve done a one day forestry course there (which was great!) and visited their woodworking workshop where the course is run. I was hugely impressed with what course was offering and by the quality of the teaching.
B: On the one hand, I enjoy making furniture that I’ve made before. It’s nice working on something you know the parameters of and then refining it until your really happy with both the making process and the final outcome.
On the other hand, I also love the process of developing new pieces of furniture. Making the Turnmill Prep Table for Clerkenwell Design Week last year was a great example of what I really enjoy doing. We had a really fast turnaround on the project, requiring us to quickly make multiple prototypes and adjust details as we went. Prototyping is a really rewarding experience. Taking an image from CAD and translating it into reality, it’s an imperfect, at times unpredictable process, but it’s actually really fun. There’s a great moment when you’re putting it together and suddenly feel this huge relief that it works, practically and aesthetically.
One of the most enjoyable parts of working at Pluck is the teamwork and collaboration. *Ben gestures to a fluted glass cabinet behind him* for example, without Yann, George, Lloyd, Leila and myself this wouldn’t be the elegant and practical piece of furniture that it is, with everyone contributing to the design and manufacturing process from their unique perspective and with their respective skills. The creativity that comes with collaboration is hard to beat.
B:We work with really nice timber at Pluck, including some quite unusual woods like the Elm and London Plane as well as American Cherry, to name a few. Elm and London Plane are very beautiful but sourcing them can be tricky, because the trees are not commercially grown. Instead, we’ll often get our wood from timber yards that use “street trees” that have had to be taken down. These trees don’t aways grow straight which makes them a lot more challenging to work with. You’ll get surprise twists and tension that only become apparent once you’ve cut into the wood.
Cherry is a very different material to work with. It grows in enormous forests in America where the trees are huge. We get these massive flawless Cherry boards that are just perfect and very easy to use.
The variety of the woods we use makes each piece of furniture unique, with its own character. The wood itself often provides the limitations, and working within the constrictions of the available material is a really fun challenge.
L: The Pluck team knows you for being a really great cabinet maker AND chef too, what is your favourite food?
[Ben has co-hosted various events at Pluck including supper clubs, lunchtime hot pots, homemade bread and kimchi nights, BBQs]
B: I’m definitely not a chef but I do like cooking! Gathering people together to share food is something I really love doing. We’ve done a few supper clubs at Pluck and I love getting stuck in – from cooking the food to making thoughtful wine parings and even to making boards for serving up homemade bread.
