* mandatory
Deep Practice combined with Inspiration from industry leading professionals in an active workshop...
Hard work, often unpredictable, and not always well paid. Yet with total fullfillment, and absolute contentment, for those that stay with it.
This place, Rowden, is unusual to say the least, Rowden Workshops are special. The teaching concept is special and the place is special, it's inspiring. We are situated in the most beautiful part of English countryside. Countryside so beautiful that it would inspire a sonnet. We base our teaching systems upon a medieval teaching workshop system called an "Atalier". An Atalier would have a Master Artist or Craftsman, senior assistant craftsmen, makers, journeymen, apprentices. All would be learning at different levels at different times, and freqently learning by doing. "Let me show you this, then you try it out, see how you go, dont worry too much if that saw goes off line, watch what is happening............"
Sooooo..... by now we should really have got the hang of it. Between us we have over fifty years experience in this business and are able to make your time here really informative.
Quality is what we do, you will do it too, from day one. We will teach you everything from choosing handtools to picking out wood to developing your drawings and building a portfolio of work. There are lots of courses and magazines that are great for showing you an amateur way of getting a good result. An amateur has no excuse for poor work other than lack of understanding, the amateur has all day to get it right, the professional has not. They must do it right, first time, every day.
You will not get quick in this year, but you will get good and the techniques we teach will be "short steppable ' you can speed them up as you gain confidence and so, work faster. The next two years will see you getting faster and more efficient. These are techniques that are tested in the fire of real professional workshops, you will learn the same professional methods we have used in our work for over thirty years.
Look at our student gallery, see the standard of work done there. We guarantee you can do that kind of work if you come here. If, after a year of solid hard work, putting in a consistant 50-60 hours a week, hours of real work not just turning up, and you are able to prove your attendance. If you have followed our advice and guidance, and you still have not achieved at least one major piece of work to that standard of making we will give you £8000 of your fees back. TELL ME WHICH COLLEGE WILL GIVE YOU YOUR COURSE FEES BACK IF THEY FAIL TO TEACH YOU PROPERLY?
Courses are costing more, you want to get better value, this is an intensive hardworking high cost high value year. If you put in the effort, you get the result. We cannot guarantee a job in a top workshop but lots of our students are in that position. We cannot be sure you will run a successful business but lots are doing just that, be we can say that nowhere else in the world has a better track record training furniture designer makers, and doing it fast.
You will not get quick in this year, but you will get good and the techniques we teach will be "short steppable ' you can speed them up as you gain confidence and so, work faster. The next two years will see you getting faster and more efficient. These are techniques that are tested in the fire of real professional workshops, you will learn the same professional methods we have used in our work for over thirty years.
In "Bespoke" a recently published book, from 2008, on British furniture designer makers, one in every ten designer makers featured had been trained by David Savage. He has been teaching people since 1984. This is not allowing for the hundreds of other less high profile makers that he trained that are currently functioning well in small and large workshops all over the world. Rowden workshops are now recognised as a centre of woodworking excellence that produces exceptional fu rniture and trains exceptional woodworkers. You could be one of them.
You could come here not knowing which end of a chisel was the sharp end.
What matters is OOOmmph....... are you the kind of personality that can take this on and make a go of it? Will you get on with the other people in the workshop and help when somone else needs a hand with a glue up? Do you have the kind of personality that is not easily defeated or deflated. If so we may have a place for you at Rowden Workshops.
Take it at your pace, not ours
It is not unusual for someone to come here with no design experience, and no woodworking experience, and no business experience. We start from the beginning, from where you are at, and build from there. If you have experience, great, we will check it out to see if the basics are sound then you will work at your own pace . If you are unsure take it steady, you are not in a competition against anyone here, just with yourself . Take your time to get it right, we will teach at your pace, not ours.
"Teaching and learning is not a top down process here, we are all learning at different levels. it is essentially the same as the experience of the Renaissance Altelier where Michelangelo learnt to paint frescos. The technology may have changed in 500 years but not the process. This is a combination of example, followed by deep practice, followed by inspirational example. Everyone learning and being inspired, by different people at different levels, from beginner, to Journeyman, to Craftsman, to Master Craftsman " David Savage
This man is Senior Craftsman Daren Millman - Apprentice trained cabinet maker with nineteen years experience and "one of the best makers and one of the best teachers I know". David Savage
Daren is amazing, he is one of those quiet, calm people that never get flustered and always seem to have an answer to your problem. Daren Millman is the senior cabinetmaker at Rowden workshops. As such he is responsible for much of the woodworking technical teaching and the new development work within the workshop. If you have a joint that wont fit or a drawing to detail, go see Daren.
It's common to have pieces of work being made in workshops nearby by skilled makers some of whom we have known and worked with for many years. Occasionally we have visiting makers join us to work with David for a single project. In this case Keith was working with two students line managing a pair of complex cabinets and working with David on a new chair design.
We start students every three months in February, June, September and November. This way someone is only a few months ahead of you. "Its amazing how much I have learnt in the three months since I joined, " said Jim to me recently. Also, the newcomers have someone nearby who recently has been where they are now. "I find my very best students are the ones who share their understanding freely. There is no compulsion to do it, but always the ones that share get the most out of this place. For us teaching is a way of making sense of the world. "
This is not a college or school. We are a working workshop and work for fifty weeks a year.Our teaching is based upon that year. You need every moment you can get to develop your skills and your personal aesthetic so don't settle for less.
Take the risk, but control it.
Going out on your own needs courage, no doubt about that, but more than that it needs control. You do not need to take more risks than you have to. We will show you how to enter the market without making a shed load of product that you don't know will sell. We will show how to set up economically so your overheads are low and how to take your new ideas, products and services to market effectively and quickly. This is small business niche marketing not as taught in colleges but as taught by somone who has done it himself not once, but time after time. In this course you will spend the first four months learning how to handle tools and learning about materials. Timber is a phenominal material, after thirty years David says he is still learning about it. This is part of its attraction, its warmth, its workability, its variety. The best way to learn about wood is through using hand tools. You will learn about accuracy, about saws, planes, chisels and many other tools and you will learn to handle the tools confidently. There are a few, a very few, projects that we have developed over the years. Once they are done you are able to choose what you want to make. David hates "modules" in teaching, saying "it is a sloppy way of fitting the students needs into the needs of the teaching establishment.
Once you have these primary skills by month four to five you will have the option to make what you want, or what your client wants. Yes, you can make for a client or a friend who will act like a client . We urge you to use this time to build your portfolio, this will be your first few pieces of work. This will be the start of you deve loping your own style, your own aesthetic. You may be artistic, or this may be just starting to emerge under David's guidance, choose carefully what you want to do with this time. You could develop, with David's help a range of furniture to be sold direct through exhibitions, you could make pieces for friends or relatives acting as clients. These are great ways to learn to deal with real customers and David will be there to offer help as you make the visits, develop the client brief do the drawings and eventually get the cheque, oh yes, that's the most satisfying part.
By the end of the year you could have a plan for how to get your business on the road, a few carefully crafted products and more knowledge about how to take the next step than you realise. If our previous students are anything to go by it will take you a couple of further years of hard work to get to a stable predictable income but you should be able to make some profit straight away. Predicability is the aim, after all one of the definitions of a real business is predictability.
Your portfolio says who you are and how far you are down your journey. At the beginning you may only have a couple of pieces of work to show, make the best of them have detail shots and really good studio photographs. David will work with you to get those shots and show you how to do it yourself. Use drawings of future projects, create maquettes or scale models of pieces, light them and photograph them against a white background so the scale is lost. Build your personal visual language. Do it a step at a time
We all have a side of our brain that is more attuned to holistic intuative, visual and musical thought. Creativity is a process of assembling ideas from existing material just in a new way. Not just lateral thinking but three dimensional thinking, gathering up processes, images and methods to produce something new. "Design is intelligence made visible." Terance Conran
"Drawing is a natural extension of what we ask you to do in the workshop, we ask our students to use their eyes in an extraordinarily intense way, to look much harder than usual to really see; if a surface is flat; if a curve is true. Drawing is synergistic to this. Drawing is looking, the more you draw the better you see and, like any muscle, the stronger you will become at looking, and seeing." David Savage
You can make the loveliest furniture in the world but if nobody knows you are there you will go without work. Learn how to become visible, attending exhibitions, selling through galleries, direct marketing through the web and public relations. Our students will have their own websites www.you.finefurnituremaker.com. These sites, your own website, will be attatched to a high traffic site which will be used during the training year to develop your public profile and used after the year's training to help sell your work. You will learn about adwords, marketing, copywriting, listbuilding, and niche keyword marketing. Attending exhibitions and selling direct rather than giving a high percentage to galleries or shops is a recommended route to market. You will learn to stand on three legs not two. Design, Market, and Production.
The makers course is exactly the same as the Designer Makers Course, except that it is aimed at those of you who, for whatever reason, cannot take the risk of setting yourself up as a furniture designer maker right now. The act of changing direction from the job or place you are in now to your new future as a furniture maker, that alone is enough. Becoming a great maker is enough for now. In this year you keep everything you make in the first six months, but in the second six months you will become an unpaid member of staff making for David's clients or making pieces to David's design for galleries. We expect you to have got up to that high standard of work in six short months . Everything you make in workshop hours during the second six months will remain with the workshop when you leave. At the end of that time we will help you select a short list of potential workshops to approach for a job. We will tell you how to best go about it and provide you with photographs of the pieces you have made for us to date
I have every respect for people who feel that they need qualifications to become a furniture maker. I have played my part in the establishment of National Vocation Qualifications in Hand Crafted furniture levels 1 to 3 and seen those qualifications systematically destroyed over the past twenty years. When a maker comes here for a job the last thing I do is look at his or her qualifications, I see their work, in photographs and in real life, I ask them to do some work for me to see how they go about it, I check out their tools, they say a lot. Its called a trade test, every good workshop does something similar, and finally, I call up the last guy that was his trainer or employer and ask what is this person really like to work with. In this context your portfolio and your attitude is what really counts.
"The Designer Maker Course" costs Eighteen Thousand Pounds £18,000 GBP . "The Maker Course" costs Fourteen Thousand Pounds £14,000 GBP. This is your investment in yourself. Check out the great work being done by our existing students, student work see the new emerging businesses set up by former students and see the established workshops. All are changing and growing a step at a time. You could do this with the proper training.
Taking a year out is a big step. We know this and have helped many people take that step. We know that managing the risk is the key to it so we will help you assess this workshop at no cost to yourself. David Savage occasionally runs one week Masterclasses with only two or three students. Take the "Basics" Masterclass, the cost of this is £750, get the feel of the place, meet the students, talk with the staff, try it out. If you then can pay a deposit on a one year Designer Maker Course before the end of your week we will discount your year course fee by £750.
N.B. Please be assured that your friend's privacy is very important to us. We will not use this information for any purpose other than sending this one email.
Add to bookmarks
Add David Savage - Fine Furniture Maker to your favourite online bookmark site
This is not like a college its a small active workshop making expensive furnitur...read more
© Hotcourses Ltd All rights reserved
