Charles Sandford

Melbourne's finest custom timber furniture.

When many of Melbourne's leading architects want to bring a custom timber furniture design to life – particularly when it requires complex problem-solving skills and a combination of fabrication techniques – they come to Charles Sandford. We're also a preferred partner for several well-known furniture designers and retailers.

Over the years, we've produced dining tables, coffee tables, side tables, bedside tables, occasional tables, beds, consoles, entertainment units, bookcases, stools and honour boards. We even have a client who has engaged us to produce his entire furniture collection.

The process of making furniture to a bespoke design often spans all of our woodworking skillsets, both artisanal and high-tech – woodturning, cutting, machining (on either our three-axis CNC machine or the new five-axis machine), thicknessing, sanding and more. Bring us your design and we'll work out how to make it.

The photograph above, by Trevor Mein, shows a custom timber table we manufactured for John Wardle Architects for their Fairhaven Beach House.

Another beautiful and finely crafted collaboration with John Wardle Architects, this is one of six Victorian ash tables designed specifically for the practice's landmark Ian Potter Southbank Centre project. Photographed by Trevor Mein.
We've manufactured several extraordinary custom furniture designs for John Wardle Architects, none more impressive than this circular table for the Freshwater Apartment. It features two vessels that slot perfectly into a circular groove in the tabletop.
Shareen Joel Design's Sussex Bench Seat teams a solid American walnut timber frame, crafted by Charles Sandford and incorporating beautifully detailed brass structural elements, with upholstery in top-stitched natural Verona aniline leather.
B.E Architecture is renowned for creating fine custom furniture pieces matched to the homes they design. We crafted this timber dining table, for a new house in Armadale, from elm reclaimed from fallen trees. Incredibly, one of these was found by Charlie, and saved from going into landfill, after it had been delivered to the Northcote refuse centre! Photographed by Peter Clarke.
March Studio's interior fit-out for Lucy Liu, on Oliver Lane in the Melbourne CBD, is a glorious amalgam of timber, concrete and steel. When you go there to share plates of pan-Asian cuisine and a cocktail or two, you could end up on one of the subtly contoured timber stooltops we manufactured for the project. Photographed by Peter Bennetts.