Nathan Day: Crafting a Career

Nathan Day in his Margaret River, WA workshop

Nathan Day is one of Australia’s most high profile furniture designer makers, producing his own range of designs for retail, and also working to private commission and commercial briefs.

In 2006 he returned to West Australia from the UK after a one year traineeship at the renowned Edward Barnsley workshop. In AWR#57, some 15 years ago, Nathan wrote about his experiences there and the skills he gained. I spoke to him recently and asked him if his career had gone the way he expected and what were some of the milestones.

You were already working as a furniture maker in Australia before spending a year at the Barnsley workshop, however you said that time was about refining hand skills and developing more precision. Did those traditional skills take you forward once you returned home? What did you do after Barnsley?

In my mind they absolutely did. I felt like I took a massive leap forward in that year. I thought I was a good furniture maker before I got there, but the reality was I had a very niche skill set that badly needed expanding. My goal was always to be a furniture maker first. I needed to know that any idea I dreamed up, I could build. I came away from the Barnsley workshop with a lot of confidence and a lot of inspiration. I didn’t know anything about running a business but felt sure the work would speak for itself and that was enough.

I rented workshop space with another furniture maker in Yallingup and started designing and making pieces and trying to sell them from the showroom at the front of the workshop. I thought what I was doing was pretty special, but I couldn’t sell them. I lasted 12 months before I went out of business. It coincided with the GFC in 2008, which some people suggested contributed, but I wrote it up as not paying attention to the market and went back to the drawing board.

Nathan Day with the Araluen table in walnut

The work you were making for galleries was different to the work you’re producing now. Where did you learn your design skills?

I don’t have formal design training. I was inspired mainly by furniture makers in the US and the UK. I owned books by Sam Maloof, John Makepeace, Wendell Castle and MC Escher. I designed pieces that incorporated techniques I wanted to try. I wanted to show off my making skills as well, but not in a traditional woodworker kind of way. I wasn’t applying decoration, or dovetailing everything, more like engineering curves and creating thoughtful intersects between components. A lot of this I can credit to the Barnsley workshop and the ethos of the English arts and crafts movement.

Leg to top joinery for the Araluen Table

How would you define your aesthetic? What do you strive for visually?

Throughout my apprenticeship, I was making mostly chunky jarrah furniture. When I started designing for myself I wanted to produce pieces that were visually lighter and more elegant, but still with good structural integrity. At the moment we are producing pieces that express the texture and flexibility of timber and we’re also utilising laminating techniques and torsion box construction to achieve long spans in our tables. It’s about creating an elegant, minimal aesthetic through highly technical furniture making.

You said that making for galleries was ‘a fail’. Why was that, and what did you do next? Did that work?

When I started my business I was producing most of my work on consignment and putting it in galleries to sell. All the upfront cost of the pieces is yours and you are basically hoping that the gallery can sell it. But I was finding pieces would sit in galleries for months and months, and in order to sell them I’d just have to keep dropping the price to the point where I was not even covering the cost to produce them. It was an unsustainable model. I moved away from that and went down a retail route. Retailers purchase floor stock up front and then take orders. An upfront investment on their part meant they were motivated to sell them. And it worked beautifully. Virtually all our work is now made to order.

Froxfield Table: ‘The design is a modern interpretation of the original Barnsley hayrake tables. A lot of my work is still influenced by English arts and crafts furniture, although visually it may not reflect this.’

Later on at the Midland Atelier you were working within a community of makers. You said you changed your business model. How did the new direction come about?

This came about through discussions mainly with Jon Goulder. The approach that I was taking wasn’t working and I needed a new direction. Jon suggested approaching retailers instead of consigning to galleries. It made so much sense – when I finished up at Midland that became my sole focus.

Detail of Froxfield Table joinery

How did you manage to get your range into a retail space? Did you have to change your production methods and the way you worked? Did the handcrafted ethic carry over?

My longest standing retail relationship is with Zenith interiors. They are a large company with showrooms through Australia, New Zealand and Asia. Actually my sister started working for their Perth office when she graduated from uni in 2014. Within six weeks of her starting there, she had the state manager down in my parents’ garage with me discussing ways that we could do business together.

I thought this would be virtually impossible, being a one man band working in a garage and supplying a massive company like Zenith. But I developed a small collection called Wonton. Initially this was just a coffee table and side table with a pentagonal leg profile and a unique four-way mitre join.

Roughly 12 months after the first Wonton table, Zenith invited me to expand the collection and took it on nationally in 2016. That was a real turning point for the business. Initially Perth, Adelaide and Sydney purchased showroom pieces. There was a period when this was all kicking off that I worked seven days a week for six months straight. It was really intense. I had a couple of my friends from Midland working with me by this stage as I was starting to get a lot of private work as well.

Coffee table and stool from the Wonton range, Nathan’s first design collection that has been added to over the years.

Moving into a large factory space in 2018 seems like another turning point. Did you have to scale up your production and employ people?

I was working out of my parents garage for four years (including six months at Midland) and had to move out as I was making too much noise. My dad found me a storage shed at a local winery and the owner was happy to lease me one end of the shed (140m²).

I was stoked to have the extra space and it was certainly needed, but the business kept growing and I’d say we outgrew that space after 18 months. At one point there were five of us in there. We did some awesome jobs there – 40 tables for Apple head office in Sydney, three large scale boardroom tables and a suite of furniture for Longitude 131 at Uluru to name a few. But it was cramped and inefficient. When I was approached to take on a commission of 21 large scale tables for a government project in Joondalup I started looking for another space.

I decided to buy an industrial property and build a new 400m² workshop. It took my wife and I to the edge financially. We literally scraped together every cent we had to complete the build and relocate the workshop. And this was all before Joondalup had even been confirmed – the job was progressing but I didn’t have a purchase order, let alone a deposit. We put it all on the line and luckily it came off. That job kept seven furniture makers busy for four months. To date it is still the biggest job the workshop has taken on. It was a great success and paved the way for a series of large scale commissions in 2019.

Five of Nathan Day’s table designs are torsion box constructions. Resawn veneers are stitched and layed over a solid timber frame with a hollow plywood core.

Speaking of scale, the three and four metre long tables you seem to specialise in must require quite a bit of engineering They’re very sleek. What’s going on under the bonnet with those?

I have five table designs that are constructed as torsion boxes. Essentially they are a solid timber frame with a hollow core normally constructed from plywood. We skin these structures with thick veneer lay-on sheets that we make by re-sawing solid timber and stitching the leaves together. We then vacuum press the entire structure. The larger tables are pressed in a custom vinyl bag that we load with a forklift.

As far as I know it’s completely unique and quite a sight to see. The twisted pendant lights you make are elegant, and intriguing from a woodworking point of view. How do you make them?

We prototyped these for Hillam Architects nearly four years ago and produce them in American ash, American walnut and Tasmanian blackwood. We steam them for two hours and twist them in a purpose made rack. They stay clamped in the rack for at least a week to dry before we can finish them and fit in the LED lights.

Nathan Day’s Ernest Pendant Lights are made in batches from steambent timbers which are twisted and left to dry for a week before fitting with LED lighting.

Do you need to take on batch work from others to keep the wheels moving? Do you mostly do commission or retail work?

We don’t act as a manufacturer for other designers. We only build what I’ve also designed. We build our own products in batch runs. We’ve had orders of 20 or 30 tables at a time (coffee tables and meeting tables) for commercial projects. These projects are great for the business and great for training apprentices as well. If you have 100 legs to sand and detail, you get good at it. You also get efficient at it.

We take on custom design work as well. We’ve made plenty of custom dining tables, coffee tables, drinks cabinets, chairs, benches, beds etc. Some we may never make again. Some we might do custom versions of and others become key products that we will make over and over. If I were concentrating only on one area, say private commissions, the business would be quiet and inconsistent. But taking on commercial projects as well as private residential work, custom design and also wholesaling and distributing through select retail outlets, the workshop has been constantly busy for at least six years.

Showing the Wonton four-way mitre joint construction

How has the pandemic and lockdowns affected you? You said things went quiet and then ‘from 0-100 in an instant’.

That was such a strange time. In early 2020 we had multiple projects either on hold or cancelled. The prospects were looking grim. I had three employees at the time whose jobs were all in jeopardy. Everyone was stressing out. But we qualified for JobKeeper and that kept us going.

We took the opportunity to do a bunch of jobs that previously had been low priority. We made sample boxes for our retailers, re-organised the workshop and did some product development. I also chased work pretty hard through this period. I followed up with every person who had enquired about furniture in the previous six months to see if they wanted to go ahead. Anyone who hadn’t actually said ‘no thanks’, I checked in with. I picked up a small amount of work, and then Zenith booked us a great job doing custom bench seats for the Shepparton Art Museum.

Shortly after that Kerry Hill Architects got us to do a suite of pieces for a large scale residential job and then we just got completely bombarded with enquiries and our lead time blew out. We put it down to people not going on overseas holidays and spending more time at home so they were updating furniture. It was amazing! We employed another furniture maker and put on a second apprentice. It’s the first time that we have gone into January with at least the next three months booked out – 2020 was a wild ride.

Joinery for the Wonton meeting table

If we speak to you in another 15 years time where do you see yourself?

I’d say the business will be similar. I’ve got no ambition of becoming a furniture factory. The type of work may transition and I’d like to do more sculptural pieces but at a glance the business will probably look quite similar. We will continue to be selective in the work we take on and I’d like to not be working 60 hours a week. Ultimately I’d like to just be concentrating on design and product development for the workshop. Beyond that – doing woodwork as a hobby would be nice.

Photos: Nathan Day
Interview: Linda Nathan, Wood Review Editor

This article was first published in Australian Wood Review, issue 110, March 2021.

Nathan Day’s business model has continued to evolve with the recent opening of his new gallery that officially opens on Easter weekend 2026. Learn more at www.nathandaydesign.com.au and @nathan_day_design

Read about Nathan's early training experience at Barnsley Workshop, UK here.

Below: Nathan Day on the cover of Australian Wood Review, issue 110