Do you want to "Paddle your Own boat?" The designer maker course is the one for you.

The fee for the year course is £17,000 sterling. This is for a 50 week course taken over 12 calendar months. Start dates are first Monday in September, November, and February and third Monday in June. We generally have a small group of between 2 and 3 students starting with you each time. In this way there will always be a group of students 3 or 4 months ahead of you and a further group of students 3 or 4 months ahead of them so you will see during your year more advanced work being made by students later in the course and be able to set your own targets as a consequence. You will also have someone to ask those silly questions that you don’t want to put to David or Daren.

Build your portfolio of work: these images are to become your credentials as a professional.

Fees are payable in the form of a £3,000 non-returnable deposit paid when reserving a place. £11,000 is then payable on the first day of your course and a further £3,000 payable on the first Monday in the second six months of your course. If you are coming from abroad we will require that a funds transfer has been made to our account twelve weeks before the start of the course.

Professional practice.

On this course you keep everything you make during the entire year that you are with us and we would expect you to use this year to develop your own portfolio of work, either making furniture for your own clients under our supervision, and developing your own personal aesthetic, perhaps designing a range of furniture that will inhabit your future exhibition stand or creating the prototypes for a range of batch furniture, whichever you think is the most appropriate way of developing your work and establishing the foundations for what may become your embryo business. This is definitely a course for somebody who wants to go on and do their own work, run their own workshop, do their own thing, develop their own designs.

Do you want to get a job as "an Improver" in a top class workshop? The  Makers Course is for you.

This course costs £13,000 sterling. For those of you unable at this time to set up your own business, or unwilling to take that kind of risk, you will be looking to go and work for somebody else. You may be a person who would like to be designing your own furniture but  in your heart you know you will not be able to be doing that in the real world, either through lack of resources or through knowing that you are not really that kind of person. For you, the position as a skilled maker in a designer maker workshop would be a different but still challenging path. For people like yourself I am able to offer a slightly different course. During the first six months you follow our course syllabus and make pieces for yourself. Provided you work hard and achieve the standard we expect from you, in the second six months you will formally cease to be a student, but become a non paid member of staff and in the second six months you would be making furniture for David Savage, either for galleries, or relatively simple pieces for clients. 

You would be treated like a member fo staff and expected to maintain standards of work, timekeeping and discipline in the same way as a member of staff but you wouldn’t have the benefit of being paid. We would expect you to remain here for the full 6 months and in return will provide you with a job reference, photographs of the pieces you had worked on and hopefully assistance in finding a position in a quality furniture making workshop in the UK. Because we would have the benefit of you working for us for the second six months, I can give you a discount of £4,000 on the course fee, meaning you would pay a £3,000 non-returnable deposit to secure a place on the course followed by a course fee payment of £10,000 on the first day of your course. We would keep everything you made during the second six months of your course, though you would be allowed to run your own projects, work weekends and evening on your own furniture outside of the 40 hours a week that you would be giving us.

The majority of students will not take this option and it is in many ways reserved for those who may have the same skill and abilities as students taking the designer maker option but could never afford to set up their own workshops.

This is an option only occasionally offered in exceptional conditions and I need to have discussed this option with you and agreed to your joining us on those terms.


What ours former students say about their time here

"The people who go to Davids place are from a wide range of backgrounds, age groups and woodworking experience. For some people this is the natural next step along their chosen career path. Most people I met in my year however, had already tried at least one other career and discovered it was not for them. They were searching for a new challenge that more suited their personality and aspirations.

I count myself as a member of the latter group. In short, I hated my old job. I was looking to do something with my hands, possibly with wood. A bit vague I know but thats how it was. I looked at regular college courses but decided that I was in a hurry. Having discovered Davids website, I spent an afternoon talking to David and looked around the workshop. I then took the plunge and signed up. One month later I was hand planing some wood on my first day.

My only previous woodworking experience was DIY related, which I quickly discovered had little relevance to making fine furniture. The first few weeks are designed to learn various basic skills such as how to hand cut different types of joints, sharpen tools, use machinery and generally become more comfortable using hand tools.

After that it is up to you to decide the best way to proceed in order to meet your needs. This suited me personally, as I wouldnt have felt comfortable with a more regimented structure. I decided to follow advice and initially build a work bench, in order to have a purpose-built work area and to develop my skills, before plucking up the courage to tackle a proper piece of furniture. I then made a small box which contrasted with the large joinery of the bench.

I was then ready to design and build some furniture. I managed to persuade friends to commission a piece, which I tried to treat as a real job using the knowledge obtained on the course. This involved client consultations, producing different designs and providing perspective watercolours of those designs to the client. The whole designing thing caused me much head-scratching, but I got there in the end. The final designs were obviously tailored to the clients tastes. However, they also incorporated those elements of making furniture that I wanted to learn, namely table making, drawer making and fitting, veneering with burr veneers, curved work, and a bit of carcass work. Everything turned out okay, were still friends and they love the furniture.

I decided that my final project would be a chair. This was to firstly learn the art of chair design (which proved to be very much harder than anticipated), and then how to make it. There were further making skills that I wanted to practice, such as laminating with constructional veneers, so again I incorporated these into the design.

The phrase that occurs to me most about Davids course is that you get out what you put in. The learning curve is steep if you want it to be. Most people have made large sacrifices to take this year out of their lives and so approach it with a certain amount of determination. For me it has literally been a life-changing experience. I met some nice people and had a laugh along the way.

During the year, I realised that my best course of action on leaving, was to work for someone else making top quality furniture. At the time of writing this, I have obtained a job with one of the top designer/maker workshops in the UK and have been working there for about a month. My first step along the road to woodworking happiness is complete.

A big thank you must especially go to Darren, who helped me so much and saved my cock-ups on more than one occasion. I dont know where he gets all his patience from. Last but not least, thanks to my wife for her unreserved support and for giving me the courage to try for a more contented life."

Steve Clewes 2006


"I could say a lot about the year I spent at Rowden and in Devon generally.For me though,the key thing was being able to learn skills and techniques to design and make quality furniture that surpasses the standards of manypracticing makers, in the space of just 12 months. I still can't believe it!! It helped being surrounded by students with a similar desire to create beautiful pieces of furniture."

Thanks david.
Greig Fensome
March 2007

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