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The Design Handbook
There is a question we use in the workshop when a design is being argued over. Not will this last ten years? — almost anything lasts ten years. The question is: will this piece still be worth fighting over when it is divided among grandchildren?
It is a demanding test, and it is also a practical one. Five things decide the answer, and a buyer can check all five in a showroom in about four minutes.
An heirloom begins as a properly chosen, properly prepared piece of wood. Species matters — dense, oily, naturally durable timbers such as teak survive humidity, insects and time in a way that softer woods do not.
But preparation matters more. Timber that has not been dried to a stable moisture content before it is cut into joinery will continue drying inside your house: shrinking, twisting, opening its joints and splitting its panels. This happens to expensive furniture as readily as to cheap furniture. Kiln-drying is invisible, costly and skippable, which is exactly why it gets skipped.
We have written separately on choosing between teak, rosewood and mahogany, but the short version is that the drying question outranks the species question.
Furniture almost never fails in the middle of a plank. It fails at the joints — a chair that racks, a drawer that drops, a bed frame that creaks and then gives.
Wood moves with the seasons. Cut joinery — mortise and tenon, dovetail, a properly fitted tongue — is mechanically interlocked, so the joint holds even as the timber expands and contracts, and it can be knocked apart, cleaned and re-glued a century later. Modern shortcuts behave differently:
How to check: turn the piece over, or look inside a drawer. Dovetails at the drawer corners, visible tenon ends, a drawer bottom that sits in a groove rather than being nailed to the underside — these are the marks of furniture built to be taken apart and repaired. So is a solid back panel rather than a stapled sheet of hardboard.
A finish does two jobs: it protects the timber, and it decides what the piece will look like in thirty years.
A hand-rubbed oil or wax finish sits in the wood rather than on top of it. It develops depth with use, it takes a knock without shattering, and — crucially — a damaged patch can be repaired locally, without stripping the whole piece. A sprayed film finish such as a hard lacquer or high-gloss polyurethane looks flawless on the showroom floor and is genuinely durable, but when it eventually chips, clouds or crazes, the only honest repair is to strip and refinish the entire surface.
Neither is wrong. But one is designed to be maintained and the other is designed to be perfect until it isn't.
There is a second point here, and it is about what an heirloom looks like. Machine-perfect surfaces read as anonymous: they could have come from anywhere. Slight variation between two pieces from the same commission, the faint evidence of a hand at work — that is what tells a grandchild the thing was made rather than bought. In our work, that variation is the signature, not the defect.
Construction decides whether a piece survives. Proportion decides whether anyone wants it to.
Furniture dates when it is tied to a moment — a fashionable silhouette, a colour of the season, a finish that everyone had in one particular decade. Historic forms have already survived that test. A four-poster, a plantation chair, a plain cabinet on good legs: these have been in continuous use for centuries because their proportions are right, not because they are nostalgic.
The mistake is to assume this means reproduction. It doesn't. Historic proportion with contemporary comfort, scale and function is a different and better thing — the bed built to a modern mattress, the chair with a seat depth suited to how people actually sit now. The form is inherited; the comfort is current.
This is the one most buyers never consider, and it is the difference between a piece that has one life and one that has four.
An heirloom will need work. Cane will slacken and need reweaving. A finish will dull and need renewing. A joint will loosen. None of these is a failure; they are the ordinary maintenance of an object in use for a hundred years.
So the question to ask is: who will do this work, and is the piece built to allow it? A workshop that made a piece can restore it, because the people who cut the joints understand how they come apart. A retailer that imported a container cannot. This is the quiet advantage of buying from a maker, and it does not show up on the price tag.
An heirloom is usually two or three times the price of its ordinary equivalent, and it is bought once.
The alternative is bought roughly every eight to twelve years, and each replacement costs more than the last. Over a forty-year horizon the arithmetic is not close, and it takes no account of the thing that actually matters: that one of these objects accumulates meaning while the other accumulates wear.
This is the whole argument behind Heirloom Modernism, the philosophy Temple Town works in. Luxury that cannot be inherited is simply expensive.
Five things: properly dried, naturally durable timber; cut joinery such as mortise and tenon or dovetails; a finish that can be renewed rather than only replaced; proportions drawn from forms that have already outlasted fashion; and construction that allows the piece to be repaired by someone who understands it.
Look at the parts nobody styles — the underside, the back panel, the inside of a drawer. Dovetailed drawers, grooved drawer bottoms, solid backs and visible cut joinery indicate furniture built to be repaired. Stapled hardboard and cam-lock fittings indicate furniture built to be replaced.
For pieces you intend to keep, yes. Solid timber can be sanded, re-jointed and refinished repeatedly, so a single piece can serve several generations, while veneered board furniture generally cannot be restored once the surface layer is damaged.
A reproduction copies a historic object, including its original dimensions and limitations. Heirloom furniture rebuilds a historic form to contemporary standards of comfort, scale and construction — the proportions are historic, the usability is current.
Yes, slightly, and that is expected. Two pieces from the same commission will differ marginally in grain, colour and finish. In handmade work that variation is evidence of the maker rather than a fault.
Nothing in this guide is exotic knowledge. It is the ordinary literacy that furniture buyers had a century ago and largely lost when furniture became disposable. Ask the five questions, and the market sorts itself out quickly.
Temple Town is a furniture maker and interior design studio in Thrissur, Kerala, founded by Meera Pyarelal in 1999. Nothing is outsourced: every piece is made by the studio's own craftsmen from responsibly sourced, kiln-dried teak, in the Heirloom Modernism idiom.
Related reading: Commissioning bespoke furniture · Caring for teak furniture
See the Signature Collection · Teak beds · Enquire about a commission
The Design Handbook
Written by the Temple Town studio in Thrissur, where we have designed and made furniture by hand since 1999.