The Woodlark: The Yorkshire furniture maker who can tell you exactly where the wood came from

Far-fetched? Hardly, because we can all remember how where we lived used to look like – before a new housing estate, or a vast distribution centre, or complex of warehouses carved its way into the landscape.

Mark is a renowned furnituremaker and based in Malton, on land owned by Fitzwilliam estates. His workshop is housed in a building that is centuries old – and it was made to last, with stone walls at least a yard thick.

He’s one of the very few in his trade who marks many of his beautiful and distinctive pieces with a Global Positioning Service tag. If they wish, those who buy his work can know precisely where the tree which provided the wood came from, where it grew and flourished before it was felled.

That GPS will tell people in the future that the wood originated – for example – a car park that was once a leafy orchard. It will develop into a unique data base.

The workshop is packed with wood, of all shapes and sizes, and there are nearly 50 species. There’s everything from holly to teak, from sycamore to walnut, maple and hornbeam. And Mark can tell you the qualities of each.

The fact that oak can look beautiful when it is in panels, or as furniture, but that it doesn’t actually carve very well. If you want to create something in the style of Grinling Gibbons, you’d be far better taking your chisel to a piece of lime.

Originally from Worcester, Mark, 54, studied at the Royal College of Art, and, almost intuitively, “began to see space in a very different way. I discovered that I wanted to orchestrate the environment. I was always collecting things, taking them back home to where I lived in Brixton, and wanting to repurpose them into something else".

He added: “I couldn’t walk past a skip without having a look in it, and wondering if there was something that I could turn into something else. It’s a habit that I still have, by the way – but it’s wise to ask permission if you can, because what is in the skip technically belongs to its owner.

"I decided quite early on that I didn’t want to be an architect, because I always thought that most architects had monstrous egos, far bigger than the things that they built.”

It was while living in Brixton that, quite by chance, he noticed that some wood he’d collected had a unique sheen, a light to it, and he was intrigued and also elated.

“I didn’t come to wood,” he explains, “wood came to me.” And in a big way, because he laughs that it got to a point where “I had so much of it stacked up at my place, that it had completely taken over. Let’s put it like this – you had to turn sideways to shuffle down the hall, there was so much of it”.

For a while, he was artist in residence at a London park – and even made the benches for it from local trees.

Then he saw an advertisement for the sale of a business in Yorkshire, and he and his partner Helen drove up to see what it might offer. That was 20 years ago. “The then owner and I came to an agreement, and that was the start of the business,” he says.

“He was emigrating to New Zealand, and I renamed the firm The Woodlark. Because it’s all about wood, and I’m as happy as a lark.

"There were about two years of orders on the books, so we had a bit of leeway. And Malton, as you can well imagine, is about as different from Brixton as it is possible to get. It was indeed a culture shock. And a big one. But we were accepted, and we now love the place – both our teenage children were born up here, they’re ‘proper’ Yorkshire!”

He admits that taking over, and developing a business meant that “all the responsibilities – things like insurance, for example – landed at once, but it was what I we wanted. We haven’t looked back.”

One of the few things that he and Helen brought with them is a unique treasure. “I’d been down Brixton market, which is an amazing, very diverse place, and I stopped at one stall because I spotted a piece of carved wood.

"The lady – I never knew her name – and I started chatting, and I told her what my profession was, and how wonderful this piece looked. She told me that it had been created by her father, a proud Jamaican who had come over on the Windrush.

"And then she said that she’d love it to be given a home by someone who loved wood….perhaps I’d like it?

"It was clearly made with a lot of love, it’s Jamacia’s coat of arms, complete with two members of the Taino tribe supporting the shield, a crocodile, five pineapples, and the motto ‘Out of many, one people.’ With all that significant Windrush history, I’d now like pass it on to a museum or a collection.”

He loves his creative freedom, and is in the workshop seven days a week. There’s wood air-drying outside, neatly piled in a stack, with sticks between each plank. Much of it comes from either the Castle Howard estate or Wall and Sons, the Ampleforth timber merchants.

“Being in their yard is such a joy,” Mark enthuses, “they are the best there is, the real experts.”

He can pick up wood, and can instantly and accurately tell you what it is. His knowledge is extraordinary – Mark will tell you all about quilted sycamore, and how it has a wave-like pattern within it, a lustrous sheen to it. Little wonder that some musicians request it as the veneer to their Stratocaster guitars.

He smiles and says: “If a wood has got character, then I’m after it!” He’s an encyclopaedia of timber facts. Holly is “extraordinarily dense, and a b**** to dry. Yew is a nightmare to use, but if you find it with some really straight grain, it can become a picture.

"Walnut, well that needs to have been fell and dried for at least five years before you can do anything with it, and then it’s a dream. I had some walnut from a tree that stood outside Malton police station, and I loved it.

"But I’m equally as happy with some wood that had been the floor of the paint shop at the old theatre. It was spattered with all sorts of colours, and it was unique.”

He smiles when he says that people have a lot of misconceptions about wood. “They believe that you can make a piece of furniture out of a few planks,” he says, “and then they are amazed to find that one good-sized elm will have to be used for a large bookcase.”

He says: “Every time a tree comes down, I’ve got to go and have a look, and I think of its potential. Estates call me up, and tell me what timber they have. You never ever know what might be on offer.”

And he’s always exploring new avenues – one successful range that he and Helen offer is their wooden platters and serving boards, inspired, he says, by Yorkshire’s fine drystone walls.

Another is in development, for Mark has discovered that wood shavings can be made into dyes for fabric. He works alone, and in silence, there’s no music or radio on in the background. “That would be a distraction” he says. “It’s just me, and the wood. And it’s when all the ideas pop into my head. Am I an eccentric? Yes. Am I happy in my work? Absolutely.”

www.thewoodlark.com