Callum Robinson on wood and his new book Ingrained.

[Music] Hello and welcome to Material Matters with Grant Gibson. The show has been running for six years now, would you believe? However, for listeners who might be new to all this, the idea is that I speak to a designer, maker, artist or architect about a material or technique with which they're intrinsically linked and discover how it changed their lives and careers. [Music] Today I'm delighted to meet Callum Robinson. Callum makes all sorts of things out of wood, as well as being the creative director of Method Studio. The company he established with his wife, Marissa, 15 years ago. Last year, he published a fascinating memoir. Ingrained, the making of a craftsman, tells the story of his lifelong fascination with his material of choice, his relationship with his woodworker father and running a small business in straight-and-times. Essentially, it's a pian to the joy and importance of making things with your hands and to nature itself. [Music] Callum, thank you very much for doing this. How are you? I'm good. I'm sort of nervous about my internet connection. Other than that, I'm having a lovely day. We have electricity again after just over four days. Yes, I was going to ask about that. You have power, which is good for this. The purpose of this, no question. This is because of the storms, presumably? They were bad everywhere. I think one mustn't rumble because there's awful things going on everywhere. It's small potatoes really, but it is extraordinary how used to having electricity when it becomes. I don't know that I've ever been in a paracut that's gone on for more than a day. I kept expecting it to come back on. My wife, Marissa, was in London. She was doing a little design job for Penguin. It's just me and the dog. It was sort of romantic for a couple of days. And then everything started to run out of batteries. All the neighbors, everyone was sitting out in their car trying to charge things. And we were quite, I mean, we have a wood burning stove and that makes an enormous difference. But yes, it was by a day four. It was suddenly a little old. I'm glad you mentioned the car because I was trying to work out. You were posting a couple of things on Instagram. And I was like, well, how is this phone charge? But the car makes complete sense. Yeah, I was able to do the really vital stuff like post on Instagram. So it wasn't all wasn't lost. But yes, one could go for a drive and that would kind of help boost everything up. And things do charge quite quickly. But it's just a strange thing. One thing I really noticed because of the time of year, probably the same in England, but definitely in Scotland is that it gets dark about 5.30 and then doesn't get light again until about 8.30. And so a bit like camping, you get to 8 o'clock and you think, well, I just got a bed. Yeah. So you just sleep 14 hours and then get back up and try and cram everything into a short little day. Well, it sounds quite tedious actually, kind of thinking of it. Let's move on from the power. We've got her back. I'm glad to hear it. Sure. We have a tradition on this podcast of asking guests to describe their studio and workshops. But where are you right now? I'm looking at you across the internet and you have a rather charming looking wooden timber background. And a bright-priced timber background behind you. Yes. I don't know if charming is quite the right word. I mean, quite a small 3-meter by 3-meter wouldn't shed. The circumstances required my way for night to line out and insulate very, very quickly because we had at the time nowhere else to live. So we lived in here for quite a while when we were building our house with our little dog. And subsequently it was a sort of storeroom. And then when I started writing, I de-capt in here because as we got further and further through the process, I had to get up earlier and earlier and go to bed later and later and I didn't want to disturb anybody. So I'm about two miles as the crow flies, or you know, as the dog runs over the hills to where the workshop is. And if I were to go that way, I would probably cross one road over two or three miles up over a cockle-right to the country park where the workshop is. And the workshop is in an old sawmelt that was semi-darelict when we found it about seven or eight years ago and petitioned to have the owners allow us to turn it into a workshop. So it's quite a kind of interesting wooden building, very idiosyncratic in that it was built by the carpenters who worked there as they were working there. So it's not your average kind of industrial building in that everything's been built by people who should have been doing something else really and who are, I suppose, rather more creative than the people who would generally set up an industrial space. There's, for instance, I don't know why it pops into my head, but the door on the bedroom is this huge piece of glass that we managed to get from a double glazing place that they didn't want anymore. It was cracked. And so it looks out into the machine shop so you know, you can see what's going on and you see who's arriving. And they asked me the guys in the bedroom just for months to get a closer for this because they annoyed them. They had to close it and I kept refusing because they didn't know this, but I didn't begin to have 50 pounds wherever it was. So I just didn't begin to have it. And I came back one day and they were all sort of sniggering and I have no idea how long they'd spent doing this, but set up a kind of Heath Robinson thing with pulleys and cables and metal weights. And so when the door opens, there's all this sort of mad noise and things moving around and the door closes itself. And there are lots of things like that in the workshop. Was it a quite day for them in the workshop when they did that? Yes, whether it should have been a quite day, I'm not sure, but it definitely was that they if you encourage a certain kind of creative thinking, you probably can't get to an eye, but yeah, the place is full of character like that. You obviously have and they feature prominently in the book. A small team, how many of you got at the moment? Are they still the same trio that you talk about? No, we're down to just Andrew at the moment. The book is set about five years ago and that's one of the slightly peculiar things about doing interviews and things about the book is that some of that stuff is a few years down the line, obviously the stuff in my past and the things about my inspirations and all that kind of stuff is ever present, but people's circumstances change. So all very happy, but two of the guys moved on to do different projects. So yeah, it's just me and Andrew and Marie's different time to time and my dad and everyone kind of moves around and does different things and we do different sizes of projects based on who's doing who need lots of work, that kind of thing. Sure, sure. Well, look, should we talk about ingrained the making of a craftsman? Congratulations on it. I think actually first and foremost, I have somebody who's spent quite a lot of time pitching books about design and craft that publishes over the years. Congratulations on getting it published. It's not straightforward and there aren't a tremendous number of books in the genre. Was it hard to persuade a publisher to take you on? Yes, I mean, I don't think it was as hard as it would have been for somebody who was trying to break into a genre that had a huge amount more competition. I'd be lying if I said that I didn't go into it with a designer's eye and think they're really only a handful of books about woodwork back over the past hundred years and you could probably name most of them just as I could. And I thought if I could bring something slightly different to that genre and I could write it in a way that was engaging, then I would probably have a reasonable chance of at least getting a publisher to look at it, whereas I think if you were talking about a genre that was much busier, it would be much more difficult to get it in front of somebody who was a decision maker. Because then you've got to come up with an idea that works and you've got to try and figure out how to write the thing and that stuff was difficult. Yeah, but I think I was quite lucky in that really what I was pitching was the idea that every time I would go to a party or a business event or anything, I would meet at least a few people who said that it was their dream to be a woodworker or it was their dad's dream or their husband's dream or their wife's dream. And yet I couldn't find anything that was that kind of wish-fulfillment book that did that that made you feel like you were doing it. I'll give you a bit of an armchair adventure kind of sense of it. And so that was part of what I was hoping to bring to it because I felt like there was a bit of a gap for that. And I suppose that's less about writing and more about being a designer and trying to spot when you feel there's a gap in what currently exists. It is interesting because the book is primarily a memoir that looks at the relation between you and your dad and running a business with your wife and of course your profound love of wood. But there are moments where you break off for tips and tricks of the trade. I guess you kind of answered this a little bit but were you hoping that people would take up woodworking after reading this? Did you anticipate the audience that you're writing for in that sense? I mean I hope so. I have really no business at all kind of inspiring anybody to do woodwork because I came from a background where you know my dad makes it all up as he goes along and a lot of what I do I make up as I go along. So in that respect I'm sort of a tape recording of a tape recording you get all the kind of worse about habits amplified. But yes I wanted to try and show that it isn't all how to put this without being kind of rude. You can be rude, Kellan. It's absolutely fine. I think quite often there is a kind of fetishization of hand tools and dovetails and really fine hand skills which are all incredible. Very few of which I am very proficient at. And the more I say oh no I can't do any of those things the more people go ah I use you being modest but actually I'm not very good at any of those things. I never really was. But the pleasure of it, the fun of it, the creative playground that it is to get to work with such versatile material and something that's so forgiving. Yeah I really wanted to kind of bring some of that playfulness through of how much fun this job is and if that inspired anybody to be like, "Well, I might give it a go because it sounds like if this guy can do it and he's writing these silly things, then maybe I can do it." And if you read some writing about certain kinds of crafts, it might appear to you that it's not really for you. I really didn't want it to feel like that because I have no business writing in that way. So, yeah, I mean, inspiring is a big scary word, but I was hoping to be motivational. And those are the lessides. They were really good fun to write. They were kind of my favourite part of the book, really. I mean, it's writing something you've always done. There are pieces on your website of you doing pieces for their Scotsman, their own e-bike riding and the Hebrides and rowing crews. Is this something that you've had going on in the background for a while? Yeah, I mean, I've always loved to do it. And I think that itch has been scratched along the way by writing about the kind of work that we do. Anybody who runs a creative business will know that they either love that part of it or they hate that part of it, where they've got to try and write marketing for themselves essentially. And I always loved it. In fact, if you ask my wife, it's the bit of it that I like the most is getting to tell stories about the things that we make. So, I suppose that sort of honed my craft a little bit. And in some ways, that was helpful for writing about what we do because that's the thing that I've been doing in a way for a few years. But I hadn't really tried to do it and get published until probably about five years ago or something like that. And I had some friends who were rowing the Atlantic and I thought maybe I could get to write about that. And then they ended up doing rather better than anybody expected them to do. And so I got to write a follow-up. I came third, right? Yeah, they did really well. And they were a bit older than everybody else. And so I got to do a follow-up piece with them. And I really got the bug of doing it. And at that point, I was trying to develop this as well. And yeah, I mean, anybody who's ever received an email from me will know. I'd rather like to send them my own voice. So, yeah, there's a bit of that. And is there a relationship between making and writing? Absolutely. Absolutely. I mean, I think when you start working on a thing, anybody who makes things will recognize that part where you stand back from it and you don't really want to do anything else to it because it works. And then the sort of wonderful sense of it growing and you being lost in it. And that kind of flow state of losing whole hours, I find that to be a very similar thing in some of the work I would do in the workshop when I was doing design, but mostly when I was working with my hands on projects. And when writing is going well, that's what it feels like. So although I could make all kinds of comparisons with the craft of it and having to try it in a million different ways to see if it will work. And anecdotal either I discovered during the process of this book that Microsoft Word has a 1000 undo limit on its undo function, which is to me a very similar thing to try one error in the workshop. But more than anything, it's achieving that flow state, which I think all of us are the, yes, that's the prize. Which I think Richard Senet described as a state of relaxed concentration in his book, The Craftsman, which I quite liked. Yeah, I think that's a really nice way of putting it. I mean, I have found that in different ways in the workshop, I think I wrote something for the observer or the guardian about the sort of mindfulness and flow state of hand sanding things, which the guys in the workshop all hate. And I have always liked because it is, I wouldn't call it relaxed. Your mind is sort of relaxed. It's quite physically engaged. But it is, you feel like you're doing something useful and you're progressing something and you can feel something changing under your hands and you're sort of very in touch with the sense of touch and feel. And yes, I've always loved that. Then there's that different kind of thing where you're making something or you're working with some tool that is possibly a little bit treacherous. And you really got to have a feel for the material and you can be right on the edge of what the machine or the material is going to let you do. And that in a way is similar with language. I tried to read The Craftsman at several stages. And there's bits of it that I do love, but I would agree with that statement definitely. And then I can't remember who says it, but I remember reading somewhere that the flow state is the prize. And I believe that you're more so than the publishing deal, more so than the piece of furniture being good, the bit of it where you lose a whole day, that's the part that makes it all worthwhile. Interesting. As an aside, I'm thinking about my career that's mostly been in journalism where you're writing really quite quickly the whole time. And I'm just trying to work out. I suppose you do briefly getting a flow state, but mainly it's just like there's a deadline you need 1500 words. Oh, yeah. There's a big space in a magazine or a newspaper to fill in. You've just got to get on and do it. It's a rather more functional than poetic, I suspect. But I've got nothing but respect for that. You know, one of the things that my dad always say when I was younger, when I was talking about how we got to do design and I just wasn't feeling it. And he was a landscape architect for a long time before he became a furniture designer. And he's with a different team professional and amateur as a professional, even if you're not feeling it, you just got to do it anyway. So that's extraordinary. And to your point just quickly earlier about the similarities between the writing and the making process, for me, the way that I've always learned, be it writing or woodwork is to lock myself in a shed and know what it is I'm trying to achieve and try and work out how to do it. That is the preserve of the happy amateur. That's a much more luxurious place to be than you've got to make it work. And you've got the rest of the day and that's it. But I'm sure there'll be moments when you were in that floor state for sure. You've never read my stuff, Calum. We can't really go any further without talking about wood. Sure. I mean, working with the material has always been in your life. Your father was a landscape architect before becoming a master woodworker. Was it always your destiny to work with the material? I don't know. I mean, I think for the similar reasons than my dad, I got into working with it because it was available. There is absolutely this bond and this link and this wonderful story that's gone along. But to begin with, I was working with whatever building supplies were lying around and whatever I could pilfer from my dad. And similarly, he was working with whatever he could salvage from building sites and from skips and whatever he could get from other furniture makers or people that he knew. So I think I was around it from a very young age. And if I wanted to spend time with my dad, that was a way to do it. Was to not just be in the workshop, but to be interested in making something. And that's what we made things out of. So yeah, I mean, I suppose on some Pavlovian level, me working with this material makes me feel like I'm at home and like I'm being looked after. And if it works well, then I'm going to make my dad proud and you know, everything's going to be good. So yes, I don't know about destiny, but definitely like we're all friends. Yeah. You talk about woods, abilities, a hold and radiates nostalgia. What do you mean by that? Well, partly it's a lovely kind of luscious sentence. But I think if you were to go into my parents' kitchen, there is an Elm kitchen table in there. I wouldn't call it a dining table. My dad didn't actually make it. It was made by a friend of his and they in a trade. I can't remember what dad did for him, but I do remember I didn't think it got taken out of the book eventually because I didn't have space for it. But dad's brief for the table was that I have to be able to dance on top of it. And it has to be big enough to lay me out when I'm gone. And it's huge. And you know, it's there from when I was a tiny little kid, I've got scars on my forehead from running around it as just my little brother. And I know it kind of intimately, the shape of it and exactly where my knees go, where my feet go. And the grain of the thing and the patina of the thing and the denser in it from knives and forks as the children moved around the table because we always had a specific spot based on who was the youngest. There is this kind of fingerprint facial recognition feel to that thing, that physical object, which aside from being something that makes me feel like I'm at home, makes me feel comfortable, it's just terribly familiar. And it's been the hub of the wheel of the family home for as long as I can remember. So that's sort of what I mean. Similarly, I have little pieces of wood in the workshop that I can remember what project they came from. And every now and again, we're trying to purge and I need to, some of it needs to get chopped up for kindling or some of it needs to go to primary school children or whatever it is. And you take these things out and you remember exactly what they were for and what they came from. And that just leads you somewhere else. And I'm not sure. I mean, I definitely not on this podcast wouldn't suggest that there are other materials that do that. But for me, something about the grain and something about the density and the weight and the shape and the fact that quite often those offcuts are in very specific shapes. There's just something about the material that I feel like memories and nostalgia that you sort of radiate from it. There is a distinct sense that different woods have different personalities, even after the pieces have been cut and dried. You can write about how the material makes it feel as if it's alive still when you're working with it. Yeah. Usually it's trying to make your life difficult. And well after you're finished, you know, it's still moving around and whatever direction it's moving, it will not be the direction you want it to. Yeah, I mean, you know, we know that it isn't actually living while we're working with it. You know, it's still, it's a dried piece of plant. I make the comparison with professional chefs. And I do think there's a big similarity, you know, the plants are a lot more desiccated. But there's a wonderful book by Bruce Arholy, Arholy's Holy, called Understanding Wood, where he makes the point that much as we like, might like to imagine it is otherwise. Wood was not a material that's designed for the use of furniture makers. You know, it's, it's got an entirely different set of jobs it's trying to do and they're not to make your life easy. But I would agree with you that there are different personalities to different kinds of wood. I don't have an actually worked with such a vast array of timbers because one of the things that's. gone on with my career is that from the very beginning we needed to make money. And I think that's the case for most people, but in woodwork there are quite a lot of people who do it as a hobby. And I've never done it as a hobby. And so I would work with whatever we could get that was a consistent quality that was for a project. So my range of woods to draw for my life, or living fear at wood events of people that do it, who know far more about different kind of species than I do. But you write that you still, despite this limited palette that you're claiming for yourself, you still write these rather beautiful tiny pen portraits of different timbers. Elm, I love your description of Elm. You describe it as a swaggering dandy of the forest. Tanasia swaggering dandy of the forest, I think you'll find. Tanasia swaggering dandy, yes, yes. Yes, yes. Okay, I can't it's slightly short, but yes. My apologies, my apologies. Yeah, I love getting to read that piece. It's one of the little pieces I read sometimes at these book events, because it's a big kind of scenery chewing piece to write, but the reality with Elm is that tragic as it is, there's so much less of it. I mean, I can only imagine what it must have been like when it was everywhere. But whenever we would do a project for any client and you bring the woods out and you sort of try to see what people might like to use, if you bring the Elm out, everything else is forgotten about. You know, there are obviously some people who prefer quiet or timbers or different tones of timbers, but it is just this extraordinary looking material and so tough and so hard, and we're such an extraordinary kind of history in England in the UK. So yeah, it was fun to write about. And Sikimo and Arborial Werewolf. Yes, great, that has. I can't remember exactly how I described Sikimo, a fecundan prolific, probably. Yeah, I mean, we've used that in a variety of projects partly because it's this sort of wonderful buttery softness to it that allows you to sculpt it into interesting shapes without losing the kind of peaks, you know, it's like, very, very hard ice cream, whereas if you were to try and do similar kind of sculpting or textural carving work with something like oak, it's so fibrous that it just wouldn't let you do it. So I've really enjoyed working with that material, although it's not the sterileest of timbers. And is there something particular about Scottish wood? And is it different from wood that's come from the US, for example? My experience has been imported timber from the US, which is graded from sawmills. So I'm being a little bit cheeky in the book about drawing comparisons between wild Scottish timber, which, you know, is not been graded in that way. It's just whatever tree happens to fall on down and then it's been sold in slices and American exported walnut ash, oak, things like that. And seeing that the American stuff is perhaps a little bit bland by comparison. I have no doubt that if I went to Los Angeles and went to look at some of the kind of walnut trees and things that they have come down there, you know, big clara walnut or something, they would be grain that would make me eat my words. But it's just what you're used to and certainly like anything or anybody that's lived in a really tough place. A lot of Scottish wood has extraordinary character sort of etched into it's very soul. And you find that when you cut it open, so you know, a piece of elm or a piece of oak that's had a really, really tough time growing in a very difficult place where it probably wasn't intended to be planted. Might have all kinds of extraordinary things running through it that you don't really know about until you open it up. So there's something wonderful about that, how unique that character it can be. I hope you're enjoying the show. It's shaping up to be a busy year for material matters. There'll be loads of episodes of the podcast, of course, while the London Fair returns for its fourth edition in September. And this summer, we're launching a new event in partnership with three days of design. Material matters Copenhagen runs from the 18th to the 20th of June at the extraordinary Ukraine House in the city's Christian Harvund District. It will showcase brands that have a distinct material story to tell, illustrating the importance of material intelligence and how it will play a role in shaping our lives over the coming decades. Material matters Copenhagen will be spread across two floors and there are a variety of spaces to suit a range of budgets. It will be a key event during three days of design. So if you'd like to be involved, email us at [email protected]. One of the things that's also striking, and you write very fluently about from time to time, is the sense of danger that comes from working with material, the fact that you're working with sharp blades and other machines that do serious, serious damage. Does that possibility of injury add to the thrill of a finished object? I think probably it does, yes. I mean, it certainly is a younger person. It was something that is like a badge of honor, a bit. There's something quite kind of exciting and sort of romantic about it. That being said, if you ever, what furniture makers get into a conversation where they're essentially doing that lethal weapon bit and they're comparing scars quite quickly, you watch that they just, they can't do it anymore because you start to think too much about it. Yeah, I mean, it is terrifying, but I make the point and I absolutely stand behind the idea that every now and again, it is important that something bites you, hopefully not in a really savage way, but so that you'll remember that it is dangerous, because it's so easy to get blizzied as I'm sure it is for anybody who operates anything really dangerous. You know, I can well imagine that people who are out there with chainsaws kind of forget that they're absolutely terrifyingly dangerous. Or if you're a deep sea fisherman or something, that anything dreadful could just happen at any moment. It isn't as dangerous as some jobs, but definitely in the modern world, there is something quite nice about feeling that you are in some sort of control of this and you understand the risks and you've taken care and you are, you have some agency over what you're doing rather than sitting in front of a computer or whatever it is that regular people do with their days. There's also a passage which I was really intrigued by where you talk about machine tool vertigo, which you first experienced in a Tasmanian Tim Bjarz, and you talked about your desire to throw yourself headfirst at a bandsaw and split yourself down the middle. And I found that actually I have to confess quite affecting because it remind me of an impulse that I used to have when I first learned to drive as a younger man, I owned a little mini and I would occasionally find myself when I was driving it speculating what it would be like if I didn't take a corner and just drove off the road. I didn't want to kill myself. I just wanted to know what it would feel like. I remember telling my father of this impulse, he had absolutely no idea what I was talking about. This stuff just didn't go through his brain at all. My mother, on the other hand, recognized it. Is it something this impulse you talk about? Is it something that's common in woodworkers? You've obviously come enough for you to write about it. I think to be honest, it's the thing that I've probably been mentioned to me more times than anything else about the book by people who have worked in Word or have worked with dangerous machines that they've never really wanted to mention it to anybody because in their mind it's this sort of terrifying thing that as you say either people won't understand or they'll think that you need some help or there's something weird going on. But I absolutely think that it's your mind's way of shocking you into being more careful. I've never actually obviously done this, but I've felt myself move my hand towards a thing and then gone, "Yeah, just kind of like, and that sense of just not even being able to deal with the idea of it, I think is a really potent, although slightly unusual, early warning system, and some of the machines in the workshop. If you've ever caught a piece of your clothing or something in a sanding machine or a drill or anything, the speed at which it happens is totally unbelievable. And those things are not moving even remotely as quickly as a plane or a table saw or something like that. Andrew who works with this takes huge light in sending me awful things on Instagram that happen to people. I think the thing that he really likes to do is send me stuff that looks like it's going to be awful and then isn't awful. I can't even open them anymore, but I think it just amuses him to send them. People with huge things on the lathes and stuff flying off. There's sort of a proliferation of that now. So maybe these days you don't need to develop such a keen sense of drama. But yeah, for a long time, I was alone on the workshop on my own and the only thing that was stopping me from rushing to do a thing, because in a variable, I would have some terrible deadline, would be running a little program in my mind from time to time, which scared me straight. Yeah, interesting. Interesting. So early warning system intriguing. I don't know what was happening to me in the mini then. No, I think that is similar. You're just running a pattern and I was reading a thing about how robots learn and how AI is sort of trying to learn how to teach robots to do things. And they have to get it wrong a whole bunch of times. That's why they can't tell you leases and stuff because they haven't done it enough different ways. So you thinking about that and running that program in your mind, I think we'll be trying to make sure, okay, we're not going to do that because you don't actually want to try it, but you need to figure out that's a thing we're definitely consigning to the null column. Yeah, interesting. Interesting. We need to talk about your dad, Calum, because your relationship with your father is utterly pivotal to ingrained as we've discussed. He's the reason you discovered working with wood. Initially, you helped him out in his workshop as a child. Now you didn't go to university, but instead apprenticed with him for five years. I think you said you university slipped through your grasp. How did it slip through your grasp? Well, I went to quite a nice school in Northback. I never quite sure. if we call them a public or a private school, but it was a non-fee-paying at a government school. But a very nice one on what I call the mean streets of North Barrett, which is I took my wife there and she was just like, "Why have you never brought me here? It's beautiful by the sea." And everybody who went there really was, I think, pretty much expected to go to university. Certainly in my family, everybody had been to university or art college. And so, yeah, I got the grades and I think I was on course to go and do marketing or management of some description. When you used to get physical perspectives and you would get a whole stack of them, people would come and they'd do a thing at your high school or you would go to university. And I think I probably just picked one that felt like it was a nicely worded description of a thing. And then, as the day grew closer, I really started to think about the idea of three more years, four more years of school and what that actually meant. I was doing Euroquivalent of driving the mini into the wall and I did not like the idea of it. And so, I took a gap year and then I just kind of kept on taking a gap year for, "Well, where are we? Like, 25 years." Because yeah, he just never really appealed to me. And then, as it happens to a lot of people, once I got a job and I started to earn a paycheck and I started to feel some sense of agency and meet people and have fun that was intoxicating, quite literally for quite a while. And then, during that time, I was working in a bar and I was spending too much time on the wrong side of it. My dad, I think, probably to keep me out of trouble as much as anything, asked me to come and help him. He had a big kitchen job. He was doing, at that time, he'd been doing it for about five years. Coincidentally, he had been made redundant as a landscape architect at pretty well exactly the same time that I started writing. So when I was 14, he was 40 and he turned to furniture making and I turned to this other thing, creates a bit to try something new. But yeah, I went to work for him and then we worked together quite a long time and we still do. I'm gearing up to go to Norway with him in about a week's time to go to some of the most extraordinary wooden buildings in Norway, which should be really cool fun. You're purchased within for what, five years. That's got to change your father's son relationship, hasn't it? Yes, I mean, I think I don't know. He probably would call it apprentice because he's got very into the whole master craftsman persona now. He's very grand beard. And I think once you've worked for the Queen and the King, that sort of terminology is very much powerful, of course. But really what it meant was, yes, being in a small room, when I first started with him, it was essentially a two car garage that had some kind of some very underspect and some hugely over-spec machinery, none of which had any dust extraction. I didn't know about the dust extraction was even a thing until I went to work in a workshop in New Zealand and discovered that there's this way of doing it that isn't just wrapping yourself in hats and masks and goggles and stuff and having the machine spewed dust that you. But really the apprenticeship with him was being in a place where he gave you a bit of a guide and how to do it, but he just tell you what needed to be done and you'd have to try and figure out yourself, or at least that's how you made it feel. I'm sure he would deny that. He's a very good teacher, although of the school that makes you want to do it well to impress him as opposed to showing you entirely how to do all of it. It definitely changed the relationship. I think that it was a huge help for me as somebody who struggled with concentration and patience and things like that over the years that I really, really wanted to impress him, but I also wanted to stick it to him and show him that I could do it, you know, as any 18-year-old would. And that really helped because you've got to have something, at least at the beginning, that gets you through the fact that you don't know anything and you really want to be good at this thing, but you can't quite figure it out and it's frustrating. Some people never get past that because it's just difficult learning a musical instrument. That stage is very frustrating. Some people are very lucky and they love it enough that they can get through it. Some people have to rely on trying to stick it to their dad. But you left him twice. I mean, once, as you say, to travel to New Zealand, which seemed a formative experience working in a completely different workshop with lots of different tools as you pointed out. And then once again, to set up Method Studio with Marissa, who seemed absolutely delightful from the book, incidentally, was he upset? Did that affect your relationship? Yeah, absolutely. It was very selfish of me. I would just have been becoming useful. You know, he'd been often travelled and done a lot of that stuff when he was young and I kind of convinced myself that it was fine for me to do it. But now is someone who's employed people. It's just so heartbreaking when you get someone, you know, you put a lot of time in, you put a lot of effort in, you've had to let whoever's working with you and for you away with probably quite a lot over the years. And you think of them as being really close and there's just bond and then it can happen that they just say, "Okay, I've got another job." You know, and that's fine. That's just how it happens. But if it's your dad, and if you know, and I know this, looking back, that he never hired anybody after I left, because he's had some people going in and helping and stuff, but it's very difficult to create that bond and to create that working relationship, particularly in such a small space. And that thing of knowing exactly what that person you work with, what tool they're going to need, what thing they're going to need next and have thought about it and have it in ready for their hand. That's a really special kind of thing that most people don't get. And so, don't have it with your dad, it's really special. And so, for me, to just bug her off to New Zealand for a year. And then I came back and he just about managed, because he had some quite long-winded projects, particularly because I wasn't there to help him, so they took a long time. All kind of stacked up, like a air traffic controller. He had a more kind of waiting to come in. And I don't know. I wasn't back for probably more than about three or four months before I was off again. And yeah, blame my wife. I fell in love with my wife and she's very alluring. And I think he would agree with that. He'd understand. The going to me is a one thing, not so much, but I think being spelled out was acceptable. Yeah, I think so. Going off with your future wife was a reason. Yeah. I'm sure he'd take Marisa as a kid over me any day. It sounds like he could be quite tough with you, Calum. There's a story where you have to go into the woods to turn the water of the house you're staying in on and you have to go back and forth three times and you fall in a river, get soaking wet. I think I'm right in saying you're the oldest of your siblings. Was he harder on you than the others? I don't think that they would see it that way. I think probably, but as most elders, children I suspect do. I don't have children, but I would imagine this is the case. You get some special treatment. You get spoiled in a certain way, but you get some good and you get some bad. I was older so once he'd got his useful little helper, it was very hard for me to get out of that role. My brother who's much smarter than I am and a little younger, he recognized really quickly, but all you have to do to not have dad get you to do stuff is to play what my dad would call a dafflide. Just pretend you don't know how to do it. Or you can't, I can't. He would just get frustrated and then I would do it because I'd get dragged in to do it. Bolly would go off and do music or art or everything he wanted to do anyway and I'd have to go and help dad. The advantage of that is that I got to spend more time with him. At the time that story I'm talking about, I think I was on 12 or 13, I may have been significantly younger, but I was quite a big lad so it's hard to tell. I have worked with him enough now to know the level of exhaustion that he will have pushed himself to by the time we'd got to that point. So there was a little cottage just outside near the village of Aldern in the Hounds of Scotland. It is still there I think I went to try and find it, but all the forest was sprucewood and there's all been clear cut and I couldn't orient myself at all to find this place. Although I went with Marisa a few years ago now and I went around the outbuilding, there's not a bothy kind of outbuilding in the place and felt around the wall until I found the loose stone and there was still the hamlet cigar, a little thin cigar tin that had the key in and we went into the house and I don't know if anyone had been there for like 10 years or something and the smell of it, the cow's so kind of musty and damp and cold and it just brought it all kind of flooding back. But no, I mean I worked with him enough and I do the same thing. He was probably 38, 40 something like that, maybe just under that and he would get to the point where he was completely exhausted working kind of 16, 15, 16 hours a day, something ridiculous, building the house and then also kind of working in an office. And he would just keep doing that for another two or three months to the point where he sort of went this nasty gray color and then he would do it for another couple of months and then we would go to this place and he had three children, two dogs, an old car and it's five hours drive and he would drive and he'd have to pack the car and so by the time we got there and he's just tiny cottage, you know it's a diesel generator, the water which you mentioned that yes, I had to go and turn on in this occasion, buried in a stock cock buried about half mile up the hill, freezing cold, you know the fire doesn't want to be lit, the agar has to be rebuilt. If anything, I got off pretty light. He was just looking for someone to help him. But yes, that kind of thing, not cruelty, not kind of hardship, but that kind of feeling that even from a young age, it wasn't going to wash that you weren't going to help or that you were going to be able to, oh I don't know how to do it. Now you know, you know, you know, say you had to do it once and then you're going to have to figure it out. And I think that probably stood me in pretty good stand. The book starts with your business in trouble. As we said, you have this company, Method Studio that makes complicated pieces for high end brands like Range Rover Bentley, Varys Whiskey and Watch companies. What kind of things were you making at the start of the book? At that point, we had got two. to the stage where I had been making in some ways quite sophisticated things out of wood. In other ways, not terribly sophisticated. So as I mentioned earlier, I wasn't doing extraordinary joints and things. But in terms of their complication, what they were trying to do, the mixture of materials, the number of components, how you make all these lists. And I remember doing a project for Johnny Walker. And it ran to in very tiny print, it ran to three A3 pages. And it was two thousand things or something. And I would buff every single screw and sand out every thread all neat and everything. We were doing really a combination of cabinetry and trunk making and furniture making, I suppose. But we'd fallen into this little subsection where we were taking a lot of the tropes of people like Lou Vitton or Guy R who make these kind of canvas and leather covered kind of lightweight travel cases. And this beautiful kind of nostalgic hardware brass and gold and all those kind of things. And then combining them with what I'd learned about cabinet making to make interesting things for, as you say, whisky companies and people like that. There's sort of no CNC building jigs working with leather workers, working with engineers, trying to do everything with very limited graphics packages. Almost everything we would do would be done with sketch up and little bits of CAD here and there, thanks to Marie Sopin, kind of a wizard with that stuff. Where we kind of were at that point was that I had figured out how to do that in much the same way as my dad would, which is to get to that point of exhaustion and just push past it. And I didn't renew how I was going to do it and then I would figure it out. And then when we started to have to hire employees, it's not really a word that is the right kind of word for the people that work with us. You know, people come in and collaborate with us. It became very difficult because I had to try and figure out how to communicate those things to people in the workshop. I think if it be if you have a more technical, proper training background and you understand how things are supposed to work, then maybe it's easier to communicate those things to the people that you work with. But I always had a real problem with it. So we had this challenge where we'd have to hire people who, when we were interviewing them, we kind of had to say, well, you know, we've no idea what it is you're going to be asked to do, except that it'll be different every single month. You will never be asked to do the same thing twice. And I will probably not be able to tell you how to do it because I could tell you how I would do it, but it isn't going to be how you're going to want to do it. And so there was quite a lot of friction at times with the people in the workshop simply because sometimes they wanted answers and I just didn't know how to communicate those things to them. But the level had got to the point that it had to be very, very good because it was for, as you say, great big brands and big companies. And then added to that is the problem that you're working with an actual material that moves pretty much as soon as you look at it. So working with tolerances of a half millimeter and trying to make it have really, you know, great big kind of cantilever is on things and trying to make doors to stuff that they shouldn't really, yeah, was, was difficult. So I think part of it, I'm probably getting off track here, but comes from understanding not quite as much about the material as perhaps you should, but having this faith in it that it'll let you do whatever you want. And so we were making things that had an originality to them, but at times we were a little bit, or like a concept car and so things could go wrong. And then a job falls through. You're in trouble with the bank. You have to change the nature of what it is that you do. You decide to make furniture and open a showroom on the high street of your local town in Nisco, not far from Edinburgh. When your father was made of dandarmus, he said, you know, as a landscape, architect, he took up making furniture. So there's a kind of neat symmetry there, which I'm sure where you obviously have thought about. But it's like you ages to tell your dad about the business. You obviously love him and so I'm sure other readers will be an iser and he was wondering why it took you so long. Well, I mean, I think it comes from a similar kind of emotional response to what I was talking about earlier is that not a fear, you know, and as much as he and I joke about it and altise him about, you know, when we were making the chapter headers and I kept trying to make him bigger and me smaller and it's more that I don't like to go to him. Because the first thing he's going to say is, what are your three ideas of how you're going to get out of this thing? There's just no point going unless you've got some plan. My wife would just be forming at the mouth and I'm similar with anybody who works with us who comes in and they've got some problem. The idea of a problem without some solution. It might not be the right solution, but you know, you'd got to have a idea of how you might solve it or some suggestion as how you might solve it. So that's really what it was about. But it's also a huge motivator for me, whether I'm conscious of it or not and having sat in a room and written about it for, you know, a year, I'm more conscious of it than perhaps I should be that I am motivated by this sense of wanting to not disappoint him and for him to be proud and him to think that's impressive. So it probably all kind of stemmed from there. But as I outlined in the book, that was more than anything that was in my own, that's my own problem, my own head and he actually was very, very helpful. As he always is, my parents are always the people who are at the end of the phone to come and rescue me. And in grain, I mean, ultimately it's about rediscovering the joy of making yourself, isn't it? I mean, when we first meet you, you're, as you've described a little bit, spending your days chasing clients in a room, emailing people, trying to find the next job and by the end you're back, making rocking chairs and tables and seemingly thoroughly enjoying life. Yeah. I think I was trying to find some story because the way I have discovered that I write is some in a very detailed sort of way. Now, I might quite easily do 2000 words on getting from here back to my house to have a cup of coffee. So I could only make it about a very short kind of window of time. What window of time over the past 20 years would give readers an insight into what it feels like to make things? And that felt like a really good one because I was having to rediscover things that it had been several years since I'd perhaps done. So some of the machines I was working with, some of the design work I was trying to do was very hands on and things had become quite sophisticated. And it sort of, as is the case with time, you know, I'd sort of lost track and it had been years since I'd done some of those things. So it felt like a really good way to introduce people who perhaps hadn't spent much time in the workshop to what it felt like. Because for me, I was going into that room with, in this case, three guys who were very competent cabinet makers and who, most of the time, I was telling them what to do, not they weren't listening, but I was telling them what to do. And I had to try and do it myself and I knew that my hands had completely forgotten, made the analogy earlier, the comparison. If you once were good at playing the guitar and you haven't played the guitar for three years and you pick one up, you do not want to do that in front of somebody. Your fingers and thumbs, which is fine because a guitar is not trying to cut your fingers and thumbs off. There was a sense that it was a really kind of ripe period for trying to show what that feels like. And for me, trying to remember and trying to find some language was a really ripsy to mine. I mean, you also open this store and you have some fascinating interactions with your customers of various stripes and ilgues. Some people completely understanding it and kind of rubbing themselves up against your pieces, others looking at the price and kind of drawing a very loud breath. Has their response to your work changed how you think about it? Yeah, hugely. One of the things I find really interesting about having that premises, having that shop on the high street, similar to doing design shows, but maybe less so because a design shows everybody's there because they want to be there. They're in the industry or they've made the decision to go there. There were quite a lot of people that would just walk in off the street because they were curious. So they were passing or they just like the sign or they want to come in and see things. So the reaction of what I would think of as regular people who I hadn't been around much because I had for years only been around because all I do is work. So all I've been around was people who were in the industry for whom, even if they are impressed, they don't say that because that's what will be the point. There are other professionals and so that's how they see things. So to watch someone's visceral reaction to a form or a material or a smell or a combination of all those things was a really potent experience. And as you mentioned at times it was very bipolar so it would be wonderful and then it would be awful as somebody noticed the price tag or because it's taken a long time to make or as someone just doesn't understand that there isn't another one in the back because this is the only one that we were able to make. And similarly with people's response to the book you spend 15 years, 20 years working in a material or in a medium and only really looking at it from one angle. And then when you start to try and look at it from a different angle, so in this case writing about it or in the shop trying to have clients who are from a very different walk of life, you see it from a different perspective. It was a growth experience and unfortunately I think most growth experiences were there so a little painful at the time. When you talk about yourself struggling in social situations, has that improved since you opened a store? I got better at being able to stand back and be that character and that probably sounds a little inauthentic but it's just a tool for somebody who is a little insecure in social situations and I definitely had to learn it. There were times when I was younger, I was a barman and you get used to it. You get used to it when you travel, you're young and you go on your backpack for a year, you get pretty used to talking to people but I hadn't done it. for 10 years apart from the guys in the workshop. And you know, I paid them. So they kind of had to be nice to me. But the people in the shop, that wasn't the case. So I talk a little bit in the book about standing there, you know, with my, I get home and I couldn't move my neck and my shoulders because I'd had my hands so firmly kind of clasp behind my back trying to find a position to stand in that felt non-threatening. And I don't know if it made it into the final edit, but there was one particular incident where I very nearly broke one of my own thumbs because I was had it behind my back and I was just so kind of on edge. And when someone said something, it nearly, it nearly went. It was a growth experience, but there are some wonderful people in there and one or two of them know who they are. One of the things that I really loved was, and I was nervous about it, but giving them a copy of the book and they could see who they were and they were kind of tickled by it. Good. Good. Our time is basically up, Calum. Thank you very much. It's the kind of cliched final question of a podcast such as this. What are your plans for the future? Your father's become this rather brilliant wood cover. Is that something you could see yourself doing? No, because I have this horrible feeling that I wouldn't be as good at it as he is, but also even if I was to get good, then I would sort of ruin it for him. I just don't have the patience for that. I mean, he has this extraordinary Buddhist monk patience that I just, I don't know how he does it. Maybe it's just the thing that you find that lets you do that. I have been finding it tremendously interesting to try and write about what it is about working with wood and living with wood that is so meaningful and fascinating and kind of endlessly changing and it means different things for different people. And I barely scratch the surface, so I'm very happy that I have another book deal to do a very date. Another book about some similar kinds of things. Anybody who's read the first book might have some notion what it's about because I drop a fairly heavy hint towards the end. So yeah, that's what I'm working on at the moment in my little shed and trying to also find time to make some things. But really, it's just been this extraordinary journey where I've got to go and meet people who are interested in woodwork and are interested in craft and creativity and I've got something from it and I want some more of that. Very good. Very good. Calam, congratulations on the book. I thoroughly enjoyed it and thank you so much for your time. That was great. Thanks Grant, really appreciate it. To find out more about Calam Robinson, go to calamrobbinson.org. As ever to find other podcasts I've done and to sign up to our newsletter, go to materialmatters.design. And there are images relating to the interviews on our Instagram page, which is also materialmatters.design. And it would make me incredibly happy if you went to my Patreon page and made a pledge at patreon.com/materialmatters. There's little as £2.50 a month you can receive and invite to various material matters events as well as getting access to each episode before it's published to the wider world. Materialmatters is a completely independent concern and any help you can offer would be hugely appreciated. Ultimately you'll be helping to take the message of the importance of materials, skill, craft and design to a whole new audience. Thanks very much for listening and I hope to see you soon.