Posted on by

Furniture with a Conscience: The Story of Griffith Tablecraft

🌿 Griffith Tablecraft: Jeremy Griffith’s Radical Vision in Timber

Before Jeremy Griffith became known for his writings on the human condition, he was a biologist, bushman, and visionary furniture maker. In 1976, on a 54-hectare property at Condong, near Murwillumbah in northern New South Wales, he founded Griffith Tablecraft—a furniture workshop that would become a regional landmark and a philosophical statement in timber.

🌲 From Forest to Form: The Origins

Griffith’s journey into furniture began in the wilds of Tasmania, where he spent six years searching for the elusive Tasmanian Tiger. Amid the dense forests, he encountered “single riders”—massive hardwood logs hauled one per truck. Where others saw timber, Jeremy saw narrative. He envisioned bark-to-bark slabs as table tops, preserving the full story of the tree.

Experts scoffed. Slabs that wide would warp, they warned. But Jeremy wasn’t deterred. He hitchhiked 800 km to Standard Sawmills in northern NSW, where timber expert Peter Marshall confirmed the idea could work—if slabs were dressed evenly on both sides. Jeremy bought the largest slab he could find and crafted his first table in an abandoned truck shelter in 1972.

🪑 The Tablecraft Ethos

By 1976, Jeremy and his brother Gervase Griffith had built a pole-framed workshop, showroom, museum, art gallery, and restaurant. The shed—spanning 12.2 meters—was said to be the largest all-pole-framed structure in Australia.

Griffith Tablecraft’s design principles were radical:

  • No screws, nails, glue, stain, paint, or metal.
  • No curves, moulding, or turning.
  • Joinery relied on dry joints, wood pegs, leather straps, and twitched rope.
  • All elements were multiples of the slab thickness, and every piece was fully demountable.

Each item was numbered, and a sample of the timber was archived. Visitors could walk a raised walkway through the workshop, observing the full process from raw log to finished piece—an early example of transparent, process-driven design storytelling.

🔄 Transition and Closure

By 1991, Griffith Tablecraft employed 45 people and had become a destination in its own right. Jeremy eventually sold his share of the business to Gervase, who rebranded it as TreeTops Environment Centre, shifting its focus toward environmental education. This philosophical divergence—away from Jeremy’s core mission of confronting the human condition—led to deep personal conflict.

In 2002, the business was sold and Griffith Tablecraft ceased operations. The original Condong site, later known as Bella Rosa, was sold again in 2019.

🔧 A Revival in the Making

Jeremy never let go of the dream. In 2022, he and Tony Gowing of the World Transformation Movement announced plans to resurrect Griffith Tablecraft. Whether by reclaiming the original site, relocating the iconic pole shed, or building anew, the goal remains the same: to create furniture that embodies honesty, simplicity, and reverence for nature.

They’ve already solved a long-standing design issue—replacing chair leg pegs with twitched rope joins, staying true to the original ethos while refining the craft.

Griffith Tablecraft wasn’t just about furniture. It was about working within an uncompromised framework—preserving the truth of the material, the integrity of the process, and the story of the maker. For those of us who live and breathe provenance, it’s a legacy worth studying—and perhaps, one day, sitting at again.