About Me
My name is Neil Sinclair and Ethical Beds is my brainchild. 
Oh dear, that's a bit of a pompous start, but it's something I'm quite proud of so what the heck. Although most of my working life has been spent as an English teacher in secondary schools, my interest has always been in working with wood: my father was a shipwright on Liverpool docks and he gave me a love of wood which started off with woodcarving and advanced to furniture. But, being self-taught, I didn't have the finer skills of cabinetmaking so decided to make a liability into an asset, cutting mortise and tenon joints on a much larger scale. After some early work on fire surrounds and blanket boxes it struck me that beds had the large structural element which lends itself best to the sort of construction I had in mind. The idea of the Henge Bed began to evolve, but I knew that to create the effect I wanted I would need big timbers, and I began to scour the salvage and reclamation yards. When my father died and I was given his tools, I decided it would be a good time to leave teaching for a while and try to make my hobby into a business.
The inspiration
The distinctive look of the Henge headboards came to me when I took my son to see Stonehenge. You can't fail to be impressed by the massive solidity of the uprights and lintels, held in place with mortise and tenon joints cut into the stone. I wanted to recreate the monolithic qualities of the Henge in a piece of furniture. The uprights and cross-pieces of my headboards symbolise the architectural transparency of the design and the reliance on traditional building techniques, like at this beautiful covered dock at Chatham. Big honest timbers bolted together.
Waste not want not!
Although I'm a late baby-boomer, born in the early sixties, I was brought up in austere times in Liverpool with a belief drummed into me that any waste was bad. It's a belief that I've carried all my life, like many of my generation, and this principle permeates all of my projects. Even the wood carving I do is only from fallen branches.
Recycling the past
The majority of the wood I use is bought from the salvage yards of the North West and I generally find it in a very sorry state indeed, as can be seen from the pictures below.
Each one unique.
Once I have tracked some timber down, the first very time-consuming challenge is to de-nail and clean the wood, pare off the rotted parts, and see what is eligible for my next bed. The shape of each bed is, to some extent, dictated by the amount and dimensions of the wood I can get hold of. Many of the techniques of furniture-making which have evolved over history are concerned with using as little as possible of expensive wood on a base of cheap wood: panelled chests, veneers, carcases. My philosophy is diametrically opposed in that I want to show the solidity of whole timbers linked together in an architectural fashion, like the exposed beams of an old barn.
When searching around the reclamation yards you can quickly get an idea of the quality of the timbers from their weight, and the timber I look out for particularly is pitch pine: not only is it very dense and solid but it also has a beautiful smell of resin and camphor when cut. This wood is especially prized because the forests which provided the huge timbers for the factories and mills of the industrial revolution no longer exist. Those trees had been growing for hundreds of years, but such was the need for their strength and durability they were logged out of existence; modern pitch pine isn't given the leisure to grow to those sizes so that is all the more reason to find a new life for these beautiful old lengths of timber.
As with my sculptures, whose shapes are influenced by the rotted wood within them, it is the distressed nature of the timber which gives each bed its distinctive character. The beds aren't comprised of perfect, flawless, symmetrical sections, but that isn't my intention - it's what makes each one unique.
Alas, I couldn't afford the luxury of this workshop for vey long, but I like the picture so much I keep it on the site. It emphasises my intent to keep decidedly "low tech" with the minimum of big machinery and a reliance on hand tools and small power tools. Wherever possible I use elbow grease rather than electricity, thereby keeping the carbon footprint of each bed as small as possible.
How it all began...
I started off on projects like those above for friends. The idea to make a bed began when I went to my local salvage yard and found they had a stock of pitch pine beams, crying out to be used! I had previously made fire surrounds, blanket chests and a garden bench, and was ready for a bigger project to distract me from the pressures of being a teacher. A friend of mine had had an extension built and was in need of a bed for her new bedroom, so there was the answer.
For some reason - probably the way I had constructed the bench - I wanted all the mortise and tenon joints to be exposed. So the uprights go right through the cross-piece of the headboard and you can see where the horizontal beams slide into the legs. This was a big mistake as it revealed the poor quality of my early efforts and weakened the timber at the joint. As a result, I ended up gluing the whole construction together, so this bed isn't leaving the room until it's sawn up! Future efforts would have hidden joints and would be bolted together.
Imagine my distress when I returned to the salvage yard to find that the whole stock of pitch pine beams had been bought to cut into floorboards! So began my search for more increasingly rare beams to make future beds from. If you are as old as me and from a similar background you will be able to remember all those demolition sites in the 60s and 70s, a constant feature of which would be a pile of timbers blazing away to get rid of them. Criminal!