Fox's Fine Furniture Australian made furniture in Australian native timbers

About Us

Paul & Catherine Fox of Fox’s Furniture & Woodwork Gallery in Bathurst run their gallery selling Paul’s furniture and their hand-picked range of all Australian made furniture and gifts from the Old Royal Hotel building in William Street.

PAUL FOX, CUSTOMISED FURNITURE MAKER, SUPPLIER TO EMIRATES WOLGAN VALLEY 6 STAR ECO RESORT

Paul has spent most of his working life in the kitchen cabinet industry. His work has ranged from working on the tools to management and most jobs in between. There have been various sojourns into other industries, usually self-employed. In 1994 a tree change to Oberon, where there was space for a bigger workshop, started the process of returning to the tools and to his first love of creating beautiful furniture.

With his wife Catherine’s considerable administrative talents they successfully set up and ran the Oberon Wood Gallery for three years and sold that business to create an expanded business in Bathurst with a greater emphasis on furniture. This has allowed them to successfully service the whole of the Central West of NSW and Sydney as well. Fox’s Furniture & Woodwork Gallery sells a wide range of timber gifts and hand-blown glass art plus exclusive hand-made glass jewellery with custom-made furniture remaining the backbone of the business. The emphasis of the gallery is on quality and on selling only Australian made pieces with old-fashioned good service.

Paul’s furniture is generally fine, modern and contemporary in design, using only Australian native timbers and very importantly, custom-made. Apart from the recent Emirates’ WVR&S contract and a number of standard pieces designed by Paul, the vast majority of his work is making individually designed pieces to suit our clients’ requirements. The Emirates contract involved making, among a number of smaller items, 36 console tables that are now a focal point of every villa. The console is the very first item the guests see when they enter their villa. Paul and Catherine are excited about the opportunity to create luxury items for such a discerning client.
 
THE CONTRACT

Furniture makers for Emirates Wolgan Valley Resort & Spa, they have supplied among many smaller items, EMIRATES’ WOGAN VALLEY RESORT & SPA is a new resort located adjacent to the greater Blue Mountains World Heritage Area in its own private conservation and wildlife reserve. The resort offers 6 star luxury accommodation combined with the Australian bush experience of nature walks, wildlife spotting and horse riding. Spread out at the foot of towering sandstone cliffs, the Wolgan Valley Resort & Spa occupies just 2% of the 4,000 acres it sits in, giving a sense of space and serenity relished by visitors. Each of the 36 freestanding villas has its own outside decks and private swimming pool.

DESIGN

Paul Fox’s original brief for the design of the console table was that it should represent early Australian furniture design and be in keeping with the Australian landscape. He submitted five design options for the console and these ranged from very early colonial to grand homestead style. Resort design consultants eventually chose the earliest of colonial design.

The early colonial style was born out of the circumstances in which Australia’s first fleeters found themselves. They were in a harsh foreign environment with only limited and basic hand tools. In Sydney Cove and surrounding areas their choice of timbers for building and furniture was of a hardness and strength they had never encountered in England, as the Australian eucalyptus can be 30% harder than the fabled English Oak.

Faced with very hard timber and restricted hand tools they minimised the amount of work they put into making furniture that in today’s language would be described as ‘slab furniture’. It was heavy, strong and long lasting. When timber split or twisted as it seasoned it was relatively easy to fix with a little more work using the adze.

So Fox’s console design was born out of Australian woodworking heritage, though refined somewhat using some of the more contemporary joinery methods. However, features such as the drawers are traditional joinery as Paul has rejected such innovations as mechanical drawer runners and metal handles. One particular variation that was added to the colonial design was to wrap the front apron and drawer faces in leather. This tied the piece into the overall mountain horseman’s leather feel of the Wolgan Valley villas.

Fox’s expect that if treated with respect each console table will survive and be totally functional for many hundreds of years.

 TIMBER: TASMANIAN BLACKHEART SASSAFRAS (Atherosperma moschatum)