About The Proprietor
Nick Lumb, the proprietor of Acorn Furniture has this to say about himself:
One of my early delights as a child was when my parents took me out in the car down country roads where the trees leaned over the road and met in the middle to form a green tunnel. The sight of the sunlight filtering through green beech leaves lifts my heart the same many years later. Even whilst specialising in maths and sciences I spent much of my free time carving wood; my favourite sculptor was and still is Barbara Hepworth. The carving shown here was done when I was a teenager.
I did a degree in Chemical Engineering at Swansea University and spent 20 years in industry gradually moving from engineering to computing. Trouble-shooting chemical plants and managing other people's computers were not creative activities and I found my professional career increasingly frustrating. From the time I married Sue and had a home, I gradually built up a wood-workshop in a bedroom and then the garage, making furniture for family, friends and colleagues.
Having gained my chainsaw qualifications to aid the feeding of our wood burning stove, I was invited by the Forestry Contracting Association to a day in the Red Rose Forest near Manchester called "Evaluating Standing Timber". This day proved to be a turning point with the realisation that wood really does grow on trees!
When a friend invested money in my (then still amateur) workshop in return for my making some furniture, instead of buying kiln-dried oak planks as I had previously, I invested in a timber drying kiln and bought four oak trees from Manchester City Council. Even at this point I had the expectation of woodwork staying a hobby until normal retirement age when I could pursue it without the hindrances of a day job. In 1998 the opportunity for redundancy crystallised the creativity in me. Although it came as a shock, it didn't take long to realise that for me, leaving the computer industry was the way forward and I knew what I wanted to do.
Thus Acorn Furniture was born at the end of 1998 with the unusual distinction of being able to take a much loved tree in someone's garden and return it to the owners as a beautiful piece of furniture. Of course, most people do not have an appropriate tree that they wish to remove in order to make furniture and we can usually supply timber from our own stocks of British hardwoods (see our Sustainability Policy).
For eleven years the company focused on tree-surgery contracting, trading as Acorn ArborCare, whilst making occasional pieces of bespoke furniture under the Acorn Furniture banner. Paradoxically our main strength was being able to prune trees to make them safe, attractive and small enough to keep, rather than felling them for the sake of getting the timber! More recently the decision has been taken to focus on the creation of furniture and sculpture, shifting the focus away from tree-surgery.
Although I often work alone and am responsible for the finished item, I do have colleagues with diverse areas of expertise such as precision engineering, photography, restoration of listed buildings and architecture, who I occasionally work with and do consult with on a regular basis. I am currently partnering with Simon O'Rourke a world renowned chainsaw carver in some exciting new projects.