A LIFE ENHANCING COURSE
Do you want to do Something Worthwhile with you life?
Are you fed up with your work? Do you get that "Sunday Evening Blues" feeling? Do you want to do something more creative, more meaningful, something that is a better use of your life? Then please, please, dont just sit there belly aching, do something about it. Life is not a rehearsal.
This is a one year course for grown-ups at most about a dozen or so students that usually have done something before. They now want to spend a year learning fast how to either "paddle their own boat" or how to get a job in a quality furniture making workshop.
Learn from Teachers that can really help you become sucessfull.
David Savage is a Furniture Designer and Maker with over thirty years experience and international respect and recognition for his work. Since he started having students in his workshop in 1984 David helped teach an entire generation of young makers.
In "BESPOKE" a recent book on furniture designers THIRTEEN designer makers, more than one in ten of the designers featured, had been trained by David Savage, or had worked with him.
Find out more about David on facebook.
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Technical expertise from "The Oracle"
Daren Millman is a "time served" cabinet maker with over sixteen years experience making some of the best modern furniture being made today. Combine his craft knowledge with the patience of a saint and the ability to explain complex steps in a process and you have "The Oracle." If Daren is teaching a process then you may well be hearing detail steps that appear in no books on this subject .
This is hard won knowledge, take notes, draw diagrams, you do not want to miss this and you won't remember it if you don't.
What Price?
Well what price are you paying right now?
The fee for the Designer Maker Course is £18,000 sterling. This is for a 50 week course taken over 12 calendar months. The fee is 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 £4,000 payable on the first Monday in the second six months of your course.
The fee for the Makers Course is £14,000 sterling, payable in the form of a £3,000 non-returnable deposit paid when reserving a place and £11,000 payable on the first day of your course. This course option is 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.
Professional Recognition.
We cannot make promises but we have a very good record of training people to a professional standard that would enable you to work in a good quality professional furniture making workshop. Recently we have placed former students with top class workshops such as Andrew Varah Furniture, Silver Lining Furniture, and Waywood Furniture. This workshop has a reputation for being able to teach, in a short time, a person to work to a professional standard and behave properly in a busy commercial environment.
It is not necessary to have ANY
prior experience
You may be more advanced, or you may have done no woodworking at all. Either way it does not matter for we will develop a course around you. What you make should carry you on from where you are now in the direction you wish to pursue. The projects you make we shall select together, we'll cover the skills and techniques most relevant to you and you will go at your own pace. It is absolutely not necessary to have any previous skills in order to become a competent maker. It is, however, helpful to have good eyesight, be relatively dexterous and be very determined.
Only seek to come here if you want to make furniture to the very highest standards.
Learn from seeing World Class furniture being made around you.
While you will certainly learn from the students immediately ahead of you, you will probably gain a lot from seeing the more advanced pieces being made by craftsmen Daren Millman, Duncan Roberts and, from time to time, other expert craftsmen working here. This often includes former students who have stayed on to gain further experience. During the coming year we expect to be finishing off a commission making a matched pair of cherrywood bedroom cabinets, a burr Elm Chest, a Backgammon table with two "Gracie" Chairs a set of "Swinger" chairs in Sycamore with Two "Crazy Dave" chairs as carvers and many more.
Quality: as a natural way of doing business.
David Savage has built up a reputation over thirty five years for making exceptionally high quality, beautifully made furniture. His philosophy extends throughout the way we teach our craft here. For example, everything you make will be made correctly from day one, in that it will be made to workshop standard. You may start off with relatively straightforward projects that will teach you simple joinery but you will make it absolutely beautifully and if you make it wrong, make it again.
At this stage don't worry about time, worry about quality, as the course progresses and your knowledge increases and your confidence increases so the level of complexity of the work will increase and your speed and competence will increase.
Quickly, get a foot on the ladder.
It certainly takes more than a single year to train a cabinetmaker. At the end of this year we can only aim to have given you a basic grounding and have taught you how to function in a professional workshop. My aim is that you will be able to go to somebody and say I may not be very fast but I don 't mess up. Pay me a modest improvers wage and review it after three-months.
This approach has enabled two of my students, David Tragen and Robert Hughes, to win a places as in "improvers" with Mark Boddington who was setting up a new workshop with eight makers to supply contemporary furniture for "Silver Lining ltd " It has also enabled Si Smith, who first trained and then worked with me for a year, to win a place as a maker with Barnaby Scott at "Waywood" Furniture. Both Silver Lining and Waywood are small workshops designing and making top quality modern furniture.
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Become a Maker. Take Control.
For those of you unable to set up your own businesses, 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 of staff and expected to maintain high 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 £11,000 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, working weekends and evenings 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 ONLY 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.
Become a Designer Maker: You are the person who wants to start Your Own Business.
Running your own workshop requires that you know how to cost out your time, market your work, and understand how to deal with clients who may be in a position to commission furniture from you. You will need to understand not just creating, butb also taking that creation to market and making a profit. To help you get started on this I suggest that you design and make furniture on this course for friends and relatives that would be prepared to support your new career. We will work together to teach you the professional process of taking a brief, reflecting that back to the client, developing designs, and making the furniture. Your supporters get great furniture at a reduced fee, you get paid to study how to make furniture and you learn the way to go about it with total strangers. Most students doing this can help contribute towards their course fees for the second six months and, in this way, gain the profound psychological satisfaction of having someone actually pay real money for having a piece of furniture made by them.
You keep everything you make on the Designer Maker Course this helps you develop you portfolio of designs that will become your essential tool in the future of your business
The Artist In You.
David Savage will be working with you to help you develop the beginning of a personal aesthetic. You will be shown how you can learn to draw, how to start assembling the personal database of visual images that are the pre requisite of original thought. Design may not be your thing, but a good maker needs to have "good eyes", knowing how to draw helps develop visual perception.
To further help you to develop your own creative thinking processes and visual awareness we run a drawing class, working with a life model. Drawing is not just for the artists amongst you, it is for everyone who needs to learn use their eyes and their imagination. Drawing is about enhancing our visual perception and seeing more acutely, this goes hand in hand with the Workmanship and Quality standard expected in the workshop.
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