Craftsmanship

I am married to a wood snob. When we bought our house in 1999, my husband insisted that all the shelves (he is an antiquarian book dealer, so there are miles of them) should be made of ‘real’ wood, with not an inch of Medium Density Fibreboard. The price made me squeal. But a quarter of a century on, while friends’ MDF shelving droops like cables between telegraph poles, ours remains beautifully strong and straight. Callum Robinson would understand why this matters. A master woodcarver and cabinetmaker, plying his trade from a workshop in Scotland (location vague – ‘in a forest beside a loch nestled in the Scottish hills’), he

Andrew Ziminski is the man who rebuilt the West Country. For 30 years, this skilled stonemason has renovated some of Britain’s greatest buildings. Along the way, he has acquired an unparalleled understanding of this country’s stones. He got hooked as a young man when a mason asked him if he noticed that tea tasted different in different parts of the country. That was because the land’s personality had an effect on its water; and so it is with stones. It’s oolitic limestone that gives Bath its golden tint. It’s granite that gives Aberdeen its mighty, hard-as-rock profile — fizzing, incidentally, with a batsqueak of radiation. Until the 18th century and