Office and Study Furniture

Study furniture made to order in solid timber: desks, bureaux, bookcases and whole fitted studies, sized to the room and to the way you actually work.

A study has to work hardest and look best. It holds the things you use every day, and it is often the room visitors are shown into.

The furniture has to earn both. A desk needs a top big enough to work on and drawers deep enough to file into. A bookcase needs shelves that will not sag under hardbacks. And all of it has to be in proportion to a room that is usually smaller than you would like.

We make study furniture to order, in solid timber, in Suffolk: freestanding pieces, fitted rooms, or the two together, which is how most studies end up.

Solid Oak Bookcases Made to MeasureSolid oak bookcases made to measure in Suffolk — open, glazed, corner, Georgian and Victorian patterns, plus fitted bookcases and libraries to the ceiling.Solid Oak BureauxSolid oak bureaux made to order in Suffolk. Fall front over drawers, fitted interior of pigeonholes and small drawers, with glazed or panelled bookcase tops.Oak Pedestal DesksOak pedestal desks made to order in Suffolk — #901, partners' desk #901C, Victorian desks with leather tops and large corner desks. Made to your room.

Where to start

Bureaux — a sloping fall front over a bank of drawers, with a fitted interior of pigeonholes and small drawers behind it. The piece for a study that is also a spare bedroom, because it closes and the mess disappears. Bureau #902, and the bureau with a bookcase top.

Pedestal desks — the full-size working desk: a top carried on two banks of drawers with a kneehole between. Pedestal desk #901, partners’ desk #901C, the Victorian desk with a green leather top, and corner desks.

Bookcases — open and glazed, freestanding and fitted, from a small open bookcase to an architectural six-door glazed bookcase in mahogany or a very large fitted oak library. The Georgian and Denbigh collections both carry bookcases if you want the study to match furniture elsewhere in the house.

We also make single and double filing cabinets in solid timber, sized to take suspension files properly, and settles with a door.

Fitted studies and libraries

In most study projects the question stops being which desk and becomes what to do with that wall.

A fitted study is the answer when the room is small, when the walls are irregular, or when you want floor-to-ceiling storage with nothing wasted above a cornice. It is also the answer when a run has to work around a chimney breast or a radiator that cannot be moved.

We make fitted bookcases, studies, libraries, panelling and whole rooms in the same workshop, through the same finishing shop as the freestanding pieces. A fitted library from us is furniture that happens to be scribed to the wall, not carcases with doors on. Typical work includes open shelving with a doorway framed into the middle, a library with a desk built into the run, and glazed sections over cupboard bases.

See fitted furniture for how that work is designed, drawn and installed. The most common arrangement is the hybrid: a fitted run down the long wall, and a freestanding pedestal desk in the middle of the room.

Leather tops, and the practical bits

A leather writing surface is a panel of hide set into a rebate in the desk top, usually with a tooled border. It is quieter to write on and easier on the eye under a lamp. The options are on the pedestal desks page.

Cable management is a decision, not an afterthought. Tell us what plugs in and where the socket is, and we will design a grommet, a trough or a concealed run into the piece.

Shelf spans matter. Beyond a certain length a shelf will bow under books however thick it is, so we set lengths, thicknesses and divisions to suit the load.

Timbers

Oak, cherry, mahogany and walnut are the standard four, and every piece here is made in all of them. Mahogany is traditional for a formal library; oak for a country study; cherry, as shown on the #901 desk and the #116A bookcases, sits between the two.

Specials, quoted on application: character oak; pippy oak in light, medium and heavy grades; oak selected for medullary ray, within or without the timber; and clean timber with no knots at all, the sensible choice on a long fitted run. Modern and sheet materials are used where they improve strength, and a bookcase back is the obvious example.

Finishes: polished, painted, limed, sand-blasted, rub-through paint, natural, or colour matched to a sample. We can match furniture that is 100 years old to new reproduction purchases made the year before, which is how a new bookcase joins an inherited desk.

Order timber and finish samples. Studies are lit artificially more than any other room, so judge them under the lamp you will use.

Desks, bureaux and bookcases are often made in mahogany or walnut. See mahogany furniture and walnut furniture.

Standard sizes

These are the sizes we make as standard. They are starting points rather than limits — desk height, top depth, drawer depth and shelf spacing are all set to the person and the room. Every size we make is listed on the sizes page.

Made to your size

Every dimension is open. Desk height and knee clearance set to the person and the chair; top depth set to the screen you use; drawer depth set to suspension files; bookcase height stopped under a picture rail or run to a cornice; shelf spacing set to the books.

If the piece does not exist yet, our designers draw it first. See bespoke and commissioning.

Prices

Guide price on request. Everything here is quoted individually by size, timber, finish and specification, because no two studies are the same shape. Special timbers, colour matching, natural finishes and leather tops are priced on application. Standard designs are normally twelve weeks from order to delivery, and when the workshop is busy that can run to fifteen or sixteen. A genuine one-off usually adds around four weeks. Your date is confirmed when you order.

Every desk we make leaves the same Suffolk workshop as our fitted joinery. Where a project also calls for panelling, a library or a fitted kitchen, that work is done by our sister companies, Reeve & Co Interiors and Square & True.

Office furniture that has to live in a house

Most of what is sold as office furniture is designed for an office, and it shows the moment it comes through a front door. A house asks different questions. The desk will be seen from the hall. The printer has to go somewhere that is not on show. There will be a video call at some point, and whatever is behind you is part of it.

So we make study furniture that reads as furniture first. A desk with a drawer deep enough for a laptop and a lid that closes over the cables. A cupboard sized around a printer, with a ventilated back and a shelf that draws forward for the paper tray. A bookcase whose lowest shelf clears the skirting and whose top lands below the picture rail rather than fighting it.

Laying out a study

Two decisions set everything else: where the desk sits, and how high the bookcases run.

A desk against a wall gives you the most usable top and the least pleasant outlook. A desk facing into the room takes more space and needs a properly finished back, because you will see it. A desk in front of a window looks best in photographs and worst in practice, unless the window faces north.

Bookcases either run to a picture rail or to the ceiling. To the rail, and the room keeps its proportions and you gain a shelf along the top for pictures. To the ceiling, and you get perhaps a fifth more shelving and the room begins to feel like a library. Under a window, dwarf bookcases at sill height carry a surprising amount without darkening anything.

We draw all of it before anything is cut, so you can see the study furniture in the room rather than imagining it.

Boardroom and office tables

The same tables are made for offices and boardrooms: built to the length the room needs, in a timber chosen to sit with whatever panelling is already there, and finished by our own polishers. Chairs are made to match rather than bought in, so a long table and fourteen chairs read as one commission.

The three below were made for a corporate client. If you are specifying for an office or a boardroom, tell us the room and we will quote against a drawing.