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Most woodworkers we know hoard leftover scraps from projects, hoping they’ll find a use for an odd-shaped off-cut or a perfectly smooth plank one day. Billy Mason-Watts, the furniture and kitchen designer behind Made By Bill, had quite the pile accumulating in his Cardigan, Wales, workshop. But unlike others in his profession, he actually found a home for all those funky remnants—in his very own kitchen, no less.
The Kitchen Before
Each section of his family’s cooking space is from a past project. “I really liked this idea of having loads of different timbers so that it doesn’t all match,” says Mason-Watts, who primarily works with species native to the United Kingdom. In his space alone there is London plane, sycamore, ash, walnut, chestnut, beech, oak, and reclaimed pitch pine. “To a lot of people wood is wood. But when they’re put next to each other, it’s so different,” he adds. Amazingly, Mason-Watts’s multi-wood kitchen doesn’t look like a hodgepodge of fragments. See for yourself.
The Wood Wonderland
“It’s a wood party,” Mason-Watts wrote when he revealed a photo of his kitchen on his Instagram. At this gathering, every face is a familiar one. The sink cabinet and shelf were surplus London plane from a table design. The bits of rot-resistant pitch pine that make up the backsplash were left over from furniture Mason-Watts crafted for a hotel. The mugs rest on a shelving unit made out of an assemblage of oak. On top of that are sweet chestnut shelves (remainders from a kitchen renovation in London) with an ash wood plank running through it. The tall pantry cupboard is oak veneer. The central dining table is ash. To the left of the range, underneath the Formica countertop, is a drawer unit of ebonized oak. Even the floors are cork!
Mason-Watts credits the harmonious result partly to the northwest-facing light in the space, which evens everything out with a cool, indirect glow during the day and a warm gleam at night. The final piece of the puzzle is the finish. Mason-Watts uses Fiddles’s Ultra Raw Hard Wax Oil on all his woods to ensure they’re as natural looking as possible. “It makes the tone of the wood a bit more subtle, so you’re not getting a pop of color that’s clashy,” he shares.
The Savvy Storage
The designer’s clever re-use mindset extended to the storage. To create a pot rack, Mason-Watts took a plain broomstick and plopped it inside the sycamore shelving. While he generally isn’t a fan of sterile IKEA kitchens, he did source some simple S hooks from the Swedish retailer so he could hang up his cookware.
The Laidback Vent Placement
While the Tetris-like vent hood looks like a thoughtful architectural decision (one of his Instagram followers even called out the compelling shape), Mason-Watts admits the silhouette was sort of an accident. “It’s because I’m lazy,” he laughs. “There was a straight flue, but I moved the oven over and I was meant to move the hole for the vent but I didn’t.” So he made a quirky “L” enclosure out of it.
The Homey Touches
The wood scraps aren’t the only detail that make his kitchen feel uber-personal. Peppered throughout the space are meaningful mementos, like a framed drawing from his daughter that says “Love You” and an illustration by artist duo Harry Darby and Anna Hodgson. The cabinet handles were made by a friend, Tessa Silva, who uses milk proteins to create sculptures. Mason-Watts asked her if she could make knobs that look like climbing holds—she delivered.
Everything in the space has a different story, but the overall feeling you get from it all is peacefulness. “It feels quite calming in there,” says Mason-Watts. All that wood ties the space back to nature.