About
A small shop in California
The Grayfox Design is a workshop making custom furniture and small wooden goods to order. One bench, one piece at a time, and no production line waiting for the design to be simplified into something faster to build.
The craft
Joinery you are meant to see
The pieces here are built from solid stock and put together with joinery that stays visible in the finished work — a pegged tenon left flush with the surface rather than filled and sanded into invisibility. It is a slower way to build, and it is also the part of a piece most likely to still be sound in fifty years.
Design follows the same logic. Straight lines, honest proportions, and nothing applied to a surface that the surface did not need. The grain is the decoration.
Timeless craftsmanship, modern design.
Sustainability
The long way round is the low-waste way
The most sustainable piece of furniture is the one nobody has to replace. Solid wood can be sanded back, re-oiled, and repaired; joinery that was cut rather than glued into a permanent lump can be taken apart and mended. A chair that survives three sets of owners has already outperformed anything flat-packed, whatever the label says.
So the commitment here is a modest and checkable one: build things worth keeping, size them so offcuts become the next small piece rather than the next bin bag, and be honest when a design would be better served by a material this shop does not work in.
Working together
How a commission runs
- Tell me about the piece. The room, the rough dimensions, what it has to hold or seat or survive.
- We agree the scope in writing. Dimensions, species, finish and price, written down before anything is cut — so there is one shared record rather than four half-remembered conversations.
- It gets built. You get progress photographs as the piece comes together.
- Any change is agreed before it happens. If the scope moves, you see the new number and approve it first. No surprises on the final invoice.