Journal

The Long Grain  - Talking time with Ambrose Vevers

October 25, 2026

For our first winter story, we wanted to spend a day with someone who shares our belief that the best things are made slowly and kept for years. On the edge of Dartmoor, in the South Devon town of Ashburton, we found Ambrose Vevers: woodworker, furniture maker, teacher, and, for two months of the year, a seller of Christmas trees. We talked timber, patience, and the hundred-year-old tools still earning their place on his bench.

What’s Ashburton like, then? “If you’re passing on the way to Cornwall, it’s a good stopover,” Ambrose says, and he’s off: independent shops, foodie cafés, antique dealers, a well-known cookery school, an art gallery called Field System. He settles on “a small version of Totnes,” a little arty, a little alternative, the kind of place where makers find each other. He has plenty nearby, a blacksmith, a potter, a printmaker. A few weeks before we visited they’d thrown his barn open for a joint studio, the blacksmith working a forge in the corner. “It was brilliant. There’s space to do stuff here, if you can.”

Does the landscape feed into the work? He doesn’t hesitate. All the wood he uses comes from the local area, often from trees he knew while they were still standing. “I’m connected to the local area because I know each piece of wood I use. I kind of know where that tree was.” The nature, he says, matters as much as the making. Most days, after work, he walks up onto the moor. “It’s only five minutes up the road.”

He manages the woodland as carefully as he works it. Trees stand marked in red, waiting to be thinned. “If you don’t thin them, they’ll all just be really small, and they won’t be healthy, and they won’t ever grow bigger.” The ones that come down aren’t lost. Next year they’ll be milled into beams and posts for a timber frame. “All that carbon is locked up in a timber frame. It’s not burnt as firewood.”

If that sounds like a philosophy, it’s one he’s been living since 2012, when he built the barn we’re standing in. The story is pure happenstance. A disease took the estate’s big trees, so they all came down. The farm needed a tractor shed. And Ambrose, just out of university and, by his own cheerful admission, “a bit lost,” found himself with a great heap of wood bound for the fire. “It was pretty much wood that was going to go to firewood.” So he built a barn instead, green timber, chainsaw-milled by hand, with little more than “a circular saw, a chisel and a drill bit.”

Fourteen years on it’s silvered with age and holds his whole working life. “It’s more special because I’ve taught so many people in this barn. I’ve had friends’ weddings here, loads of events. It’s a Christmas tree shop, and the workshop.” Surplus wood, saved from the flames, made into something that lasts.

The oldest thing in here? A drawknife that belonged to his grandad. “Probably a hundred years old. I think he got it second-hand.” Made in Sheffield, good steel, the handle worn to a patina. Not sentiment, he insists, just a good tool, before admitting he loves the feel of it. “There’s something nice about old tools.”

He feels the same about the things he makes. “You don’t just buy something and chuck it,” he says. Made well, kept for years, handed on.

A favourite thing to make? He lands on stools, chairs and benches, the honest, everyday things. On his courses, he teaches people to build a stool in a weekend. “Most people can take two days off to make a stool, and then they’ve actually made something. They’re not just doing digital stuff.” The courses sell out. People come from all over, a lot of them escaping stressful jobs at a screen. “Woodwork’s meditative. You focus on the wood and forget about the stress of life.” Left to himself, though, he has a more dramatic streak, scorching timber black with a blowtorch. “It’s fire, it’s exciting. It completely changes the wood into something quite contemporary.” He’d left the torch at home for our shoot. “That would definitely ruin these clothes.”

And the Christmas trees? For two months a year he downs tools entirely. “It’s a wholesome family business,” brother and sister, nieces and nephews, all mucking in. He’s grown trees on a small scale his whole life. The pleasure, as with everything he does, is in the slow and the personal: people come and pick their tree in the field. “That’s the experience that’s special.”

As for what a woodsman actually wears, he’s refreshingly plain about it. Comfort first, warm in winter, cool in summer, and nothing the shavings cling to. “A chore jacket’s a good idea, because you can brush it down. Maybe a smock.” Which, as it happens, is more or less our brief too.

By the time we pack up, the light is going and the bees are loud on the solar panels that power the place. What stays with us isn’t any one object, but the shape of a life built the long way round: local wood, old tools, slow weekends, a barn made from timber that was nearly firewood. Ambrose makes things meant to outlast him, and he’s in no rush about any of it.

“Sometimes it’s quite nice to be tired,” he’d said, when we asked how he manages the graft of it. “You sleep better.” Fifteen years into making clothes we hope people keep, that sounds about right to us.

See more of Ambrose’s work at ambrosevevers.com.

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Born from surplus fabrics