A steel box wearing a very good suit

The steel does the work. The timber is why you are willing to have it in the drawing room rather than hidden in a garage.

Almost every gun cabinet sold in this country is a steel box, and there is nothing wrong with that — a steel box, properly fixed, does the job it was designed to do. The trouble is what it does to a room. In a farmhouse utility it is invisible and irrelevant. In a panelled study, a library or a boot room that has been thought about, it is the one object that ruins the photograph.

We have spent more than twenty years making the argument that you do not have to choose. A cabinet can be built to a specification that comfortably exceeds anything a domestic installation is likely to need, and still read as a piece of cabinetmaking — quarter-sawn, book-matched, moulded, French polished, and made to the proportions of the room it stands in.

Every cabinet is drawn for the room and for the collection. Nothing comes off a shelf. We start from your gun list and the wall it has to sit against, and the carcass follows from there.

Made for the collection you actually own

A cabinet built to a standard size is a compromise for everybody. Side-by-sides, over-and-unders and rifles are all different lengths, and a rifle with a scope left mounted is a different object again from a rifle without one. If the interior is not drawn around what you have, you end up either wasting a third of the space or taking the scope off every time.

So we start with the gun list. Barrel racks are set out so that guns stand without touching each other, which matters more for the finish on a pair of London guns than most people expect. Heights are set so that scoped rifles go in scoped. Where a certificate requires ammunition to be held separately, that is a separate lockable compartment with its own lock, not a shelf inside the same door.

Beyond that it is a question of what else lives in the room. Felt-lined cleaning racks, drawers for cartridges and chokes, a slide for a cleaning rod, brass fittings, and lighting on a door switch so that you can actually see what you are reaching for in a dark corner of a boot room. None of it is standard, and all of it is drawn before anything is cut.

Prices, lead times and where we work

Cabinets start at £7,500 plus VAT for a single or double cabinet in oak. A larger fitted run, or a cabinet in figured walnut with glazed doors and a matching drawer bank, will be more, and a full gun room is a different project again, starting at around £25,000.

We will give you a price before we draw anything. We are one of very few makers in this category who publish figures at all, and we do it because it saves everybody a fortnight: if the number is wrong for you, you have lost a phone call rather than three meetings.

Lead times run from around six weeks for a single cabinet to several months for a substantial fitted room, depending on the timber, the finish and what else is in the workshop. Shooting is seasonal and so is this work — enquiries cluster before the season opens and the workshop fills accordingly, so if you want a cabinet in place for the autumn it is worth starting the conversation in spring.

The workshop is at Mickfield in Suffolk, which puts us within comfortable reach of East Anglia, London and the Home Counties. We install across the whole of the UK, and a good proportion of what we make goes a long way from home.