About Bordværkstedet
Two joiners, an old dairy outside Træholt, and dining tables since 2009.
Since 2009
How it started
Bordværkstedet began with one table. In 2009 Ane Krogh, a cabinetmaker, and Mads Ellegaard, who had spent ten years restoring wooden fishing boats on the west coast, had a new house, no money for furniture, and a barn full of oak that Mads's uncle had felled and stacked to dry a decade before. The table they made from it still stands in their kitchen.
Friends asked for one, then friends of friends. In 2011 Ane and Mads rented the old cooperative dairy on Skovvej, a kilometre outside Træholt, because its long hall was the only room in the parish where a three-metre top could be turned over without opening a door. The cheese store became the timber store, and the boiler room, warm and dry all year, the finishing room.
The wood we buy, and why
We buy oak, ash, beech and elm as whole logs from estates within a day's drive of the workshop and have them sawn at a small sawmill by the fjord, so we know which tree every board came from. Walnut and cherry do not grow large enough in Denmark, so we buy them as boards from an importer who can name the forest. Then every board waits in the old cheese store for at least a year before it is cut. It is slow, and it ties up wood we have paid for. It is also why our tables do not crack, cup or twist in a centrally heated room: the wood has done its moving with us, not with you.
- Founded
2009, by Ane Krogh and Mads Ellegaard
- Workshop
The old dairy, Skovvej 12, Træholt
- Wood
Seven woods, air-dried a year or more
From board to table
How a table is made
- 1 Choosing the boards
We pick boards from the same tree where we can, so the colour and the grain agree across the top.
- 2 Gluing up the top
The boards are planed, matched and glued, then left a week to settle before anything else happens.
- 3 Shaping and sanding
The top is cut to your length and width, its edge shaped to the profile you chose, and sanded by hand through four grits.
- 4 Finishing
Oil, hardwax oil or soap worked in by hand, or a matt lacquer sprayed in the old boiler room.
- 5 Delivery
Two of us bring it to your home, fit the base and set it level.
The workshop today
There are five of us now: Ane and Mads, two journeymen and an apprentice, who makes her own table in her last year. We make about a hundred and twenty tables a year, most of them to a length somebody measured in their own dining room, and we still deliver every one ourselves.
We would rather make one table you keep for forty years than four you replace. That is why we make fewer things than we could, and why we write the year and the estate the tree grew on under every top.
Bordværkstedet is a demonstration store built on Specify. Its founders, workshop, tables and prices are invented: nothing ordered here is made or delivered.
Start with the length
Design the table your room needs, and send it to the workshop.