Eight stages, one roof.

Plantation mango arrives in the round and is graded before it is bought, not after. Boards with the interlocking grain that carves well are set aside for the carving benches; straight, quiet stock goes to the plain ranges where nothing should distract. Certified stock is stacked and tagged separately from the moment it is unloaded.

Air-dried in open stacks first, then brought down to eight to ten per cent moisture in the kiln. This is the stage that decides whether a piece survives its first winter in a heated European room, and it is the one that cannot be shortened by working faster.

Cut oversize on purpose. Timber released from a stack will move once it is opened up, so final dimensions are taken later: cutting to size on day one guarantees planing a bow out of it on day twenty.

Carcasses are framed rather than slab-built: more joints, more time, and the reason a two-metre cabinet arrives with its doors still in line. Everything is dry-fitted and squared before glue goes anywhere near it.

One piece, one hand, start to finish. Splitting a carved front between two carvers to save a day produces two different depths of cut on the same door, and it is visible from across a room in raking light.

Parquet, marquetry and tile are separate trades in this building. A diamond front can run to three hundred laid pieces, sanded afterwards as a single face so the joints disappear. Tiles are painted and fired in Jodhpur, then set into a rebate to finish flush.

Sand, seal, sand back, colour, cure, wax. Colour is mixed against the signed sample retained at approval rather than against a code, because two batches of timber take the same stain differently and the correction is made by eye at the booth.

Assembled, opened, closed, and taken apart again where it ships knocked down. Drawers return to the openings they were fitted to and hardware is bagged to the unit rather than the order. Around one piece in forty goes back to a bench at this stage.