28/08/2026
Our next piece to be shown is ‘Golden Brown’.
This remarkable section of oak was salvaged from an old barn in Cheshire during its conversion into a home.
What immediately drew us to this particular beam was the extraordinary stop-splayed and tabled scarf joint running through its centre. Scarf joints were used by traditional timber framers to join two shorter lengths of timber end-to-end, allowing them to create a single structural beam of a length that one piece of available timber could not provide.
It is a method of timber framing with ancient origins and a long history in Britain, including extensive use in medieval buildings. Rather than relying upon modern bolts, screws or steel plates, the carefully cut timbers interlock with one another and are secured by hand-driven oak pegs.
We have named the piece ‘Golden Brown’ after the beautiful natural colouring of the centuries-old oak. Its surface has an unusual contradiction to it — rough yet smooth — worn and weathered by age, but softened by hundreds of years of existence.
We believe this section of timber to be at least 300 years old, although the oak itself is, of course, considerably older. Reclaimed structural timbers were also historically reused, sometimes passing from one building to another, so determining the first working life of an old beam can be remarkably difficult.
But perhaps the most compelling thing about Golden Brown isn't its age.
It is that we can still see two separate beams, joined together for life.
Two oak trees that spent perhaps hundreds of years growing separately were felled, shaped by hand, and eventually brought together in a Cheshire barn. There, a craftsman cut them so that one would fit into the other, interlocked them and drove oak pegs through them to hold them together.
Joined, united, and holding tightly to one another.
Through good times and hard times, through generations of people coming and going beneath them, these two pieces of oak have remained together for centuries.
The barn that they once held together has changed.
The people who made the joint are long gone.
Yet the two pieces remain — still together, still gripping one another, and still remarkably strong hundreds of years after the day they were joined.
Now, rather than separating them, we have chosen to preserve that marriage and give them another chapter together.
‘Golden Brown’ — two pieces of ancient Cheshire oak, joined for life.
