Healthy sustainable furniture by Benchmark UK
Talking healthy materials, circular economy principles, biophilic design and Life Cycle Assessments with Benchmark Furniture, in Berkshire, UK.
Welcome to Episode 34 of the Green & Healthy Places podcast, in which we explore the themes of sustainability and wellbeing in real estate and hospitality.
I'm your host, Matt Morley, founder of Biofilico healthy buildings and Biofit wellness concepts.
This week I’m in Berkshire in the English countryside talking to Sean and Laerke Sutcliffe of Benchmark Furniture.
Set up by Sean with his business partner, the late Sir Terence Conran, in 1984, Benchmark may be an artisanal workshop of 70-plus people but they have also been trailblazers in pushing forward the theme of green and healthy furniture in recent decades.
They’ve worked with Foster + Partners, Westminster Abbey, Oxbridge Colleges, museums and countless public buildings around the world. In our conversation we cover:
How they stance on sustainability has evolved over the past 40 years to incorporate health and wellbeing
The history of VOCs and Formeldehyde in wood workshops
The link between tropical timbers and deforestation
Vertical integration as a way to control the provenance of their work
How hiring apprentices locally ensures long-term staff retention
Their brand extension into healthy upholstery using NaturalMat filler
Life Cycle Assessments and the metrics of environmental impact that matter
Their thoughts on ‘biophilic furniture’ and the medium of wood
If you like this type of content, please hit subscribe, you can find Benchmark at benchmarkfurniture.com and my contact details are in the show notes for feedback and comments.
======
HIGHLIGHTS FROM THE CONVERSATION
our workshop considers both People and Planet, our carbon footprint and the transparency of our materials
here we are on a redundant farm, employing more people than the farm ever did in agriculture in high quality artisanal jobs
We produced the first wooden furniture in the world that had fully verified lifecycle assessments
I hope a time will come when we will base taxation of products, not on an arbitrary figure of the of the pecuniary value but on their carbon cost
as human beings, our oldest and most trusted relationship with any material is with wood
======
FULL TRANSCRIPT FOLLOWS COURTESY OF OTTER.AI
Matt Morley
I would like to start with a question around your the positioning of the business itself. So you seem to have this wonderful combination of craftsmanship, sustainability, and responsible business practices. And it feels so now it seems so current, and yet, you've been around for a little while. So I wonder if you could place that in context? Did you set out with that initial vision, and the world has aligned or has it been more of an evolutionary process over the last 30 years or more.
Benchmark Furniture / Sean Sutcliffe
So we set out 39 years ago, when we started the workshop, with a highly unusual stance in the furniture making community I took a rather stubborn stance that I won't use any tropical timbers. And people were quite dismissive, and some people are quite offended. But I had been learning as a young man about deforestation, and particularly a prime forest. And so my stance then was - we like to use wood, but we won't use any tropical timbers. Because that way, we are not deforesting, and we're not using any endangered species. And that was our stance for many years.
What's happened over the intervening nearly 40 years now is that the argument has moved. And so what is our stance is now not so much that we won't use tropical timbers, although we choose we prefer not to. But it now embraces so many other things that we've learned over the last 40 years.
We were the first workshop in the UK to go zero formaldehyde, the first workshop in the UK with FSC chain of custody (FSC) Certification - we've we've always tried to look ahead at the way that the sustainability arguments and the health and wellbeing arguments have gone.
People tend to think that the health and wellbeing argument is pretty new. But actually, 25 years ago formaldehyde became the hot topic. And what we're saying today will change tomorrow, because the situation on the ground will change, science will change, imperatives and priorities will change. Now everyone's very focused on carbon. But, some while ago, everyone was very focused on acid rain, say or eutrophication.
Laerke Sutcliffe
But I think it's also interesting to sort of look at it from both the planet and the people angle. And that has become quite important for us within the last six years to have a position where we both consider the carbon footprint and the transparency in the materials that we are using. So being that workshop, or that destination, where you as a customer can come and buy your product and combine the carbon footprint, and the non toxic material considerations together.
Matt Morley
You mentioned the word transparency there - clearly, a responsible business, in a way needs to take ownership for presumably a bit more than just that final piece of the puzzle, have you adopted this process of vertical integration? And what role has that played in helping you get to where you are today?
Benchmark Furniture
We've done it over a long period of time. But in truth, most of our vertical integration came about through a simple desire to have more control over the quality of our work, and the provenance of our work.
Nowadays, vertical integration also gives us more control over the wider aspects of employment practices, diversity practices, and so forth that play into the supply chain argument. So we happily, frequently get asked quite deep and complex questions about our supply chain, and the more that we can supply from under our own control the simpler that process is.
Of course, we've still got our materials supply chain. But in terms of subcontract supply chain we use very, very few subcontractors.
Matt Morley
You also mentioned the idea of employment practices. And it's something that really comes across in terms of your communication online, the idea of adopting responsible work practices that really seem to be a part of your DNA and as a business, was that an instinctual process?
Benchmark Furniture
Yeah, I think I wish I could say there was some greater and higher good about it, but actually, it was very simple. A realization some years into running the business and training people, that if you employ locally, your retention is much better.
So we started off employing graduates and students, or craftsmen from far afield, you know, other parts of the UK or overseas, and they’d come to do a few years, and then normally go back to their places of origin so we thought, well, this is mad, we started employing and training apprentices only from my local area.
It may sound a bit mean, but when when aspiring apprentices apply to training here, if they haven't got a pretty local postcode, they're not in the running. That a self interested thing about keep retaining staff. But of course, what it also plays into is our journey to work miles are very low.
We have very long employment profile here. And so we really do care very deeply, we've got second generation staff here, which is very gratifying. So it started out purely as a way of keeping staff. But it actually has evolved into a very good employment practice in terms of local employment and, and artisanship.
The countryside has lost most of its skilled jobs. And here we are on a redundant farm, employing more people than the farm ever did in agriculture in high quality artisanal jobs.
Matt Morley
There is then also that connection in terms of the materials as well, a key piece of a healthy interiors and healthy building strategy. So employing and working locally. And then as you mentioned, not using tropical woods. So could you talk to your vision of, of cradle to grave lifecycle in terms of the materials that you're using for your products, and perhaps place that in the context of the wider industry? Because it's not necessarily an industry that's known for getting everything right, in that sense, but you've really taken a stance on it.
Benchmark Furniture
Yes, and we, we have the great advantage that we our principle material is wood, I mean, 99% of everything we make originates as a tree. So we have a fantastic advantage in terms of sustainability, providing that we're making sure we're buying our wood entirely from sustainably forested sources. And that's an absolute must for us, you know, we will only do that.
The materials that do extend beyond wood into upholstery, for example, we've changed radically our approach to upholstery, because that's where there is use of petrochemical foams, which is almost ubiquitous in the in upholstery world. They're very nasty business.
We were really lucky that some 10 years ago, we started working with Imperial College London on lifecycle assessment. So we did this as some projects that we did with the Royal College and, and the American Hardwood Export Council, looking at measuring the the real proper metrics of cradle to grave lifecycle assessments. We produced the first wooden furniture in the world that had fully verified lifecycle assessments.
And we've continued to do that, it's an evolving science in it - It's an imperfect science still. But we now on all our core ranges do environmental product declarations, which include lifecycle assessments. And we're able to give not just the carbon content or the carbon store, of the pieces of furniture, but also all the other measures the other seven measures of environmental impact that are embodied within the work we do.
So it's a really fascinating things. And in order to be really transparent, and protect against a world that is flooded with greenwash, we really need metrics. And is only through lifecycle assessment and independent verification, that we can get reliable and proper metrics and people can, can see and trust the knowledge they've been given about the impact of what they're buying.
Laerke Sutcliffe
I think we also decided about I think it's five years ago, that we wanted to take it to the next level as Sean was saying, the fact that all products today are declaring themselves ‘sustainable’. So you know, where does that leave us, a firm who truly has been sustainable from the very beginning, before it was something cool?
Where if we wanted to keep leading the way in terms of taking it to the next levels, how did we best interact with the movement, so we decided to have third party verification to be able to put the hard facts on the table.
So in that process, we had to go back and analyze a little bit the materials that we were using, so glues, oil, and upholstery was our biggest challenge. And we then went into to a process of putting quite a bit of pressure on our supply chain, which I think is needed, you know, people, like ourselves and our friends in the industry required a lot of responsibility in terms of choosing the materials that we put out in the world.
So if we can put that pressure on the supply chain saying, guys, unless you can meet those criteria, so there was transparency. In our case, we wanted to have a declare label on the products, so unless the products that our supply chain provided could meet that the low VOC basically, they couldn't deal with it, we couldn't deal with them.
So we had to have some upfront meetings about either we work on this together, and we get to where we need to be at, or we have to go and look for other places to source our core materials. So I think that was a really interesting process.
And as Sean say, you know, we obviously come from a very good starting point because we work mainly in timber, but we still did have to do get our clues and our oils and, and PE and really in engage with the upholstery. And I don't know if it's worth it going into sort of like a deeper sort of description of how we did
Matt Morley
So the even the idea that your furniture could be unhealthy, that a flame retardant, a chemical process is going to off gas into your home or your office over the first six to 12 months, the idea that the adhesives might do the same and lower the quality of the indoor air in your space. And also you mentioned the filler but I saw that you'd found an ingenious solution by working with a UK company that I know from Devon who do the wonderful natural mattresses - so you went to a natural mattress company to find a solution to fix the issue around nasty foam filler as your upholstery?
Laerke Sutcliffe
That's right. And and I think as I said, you know, we started out by putting pressure on the existing supply chain and didn't actually get anywhere. For us, it was quite important to actually do the heavy work ourself, because you get into the grid of what it actually really takes to not just tick the box, but actually do the right things.
So we, in the research process, it became quite clear for us we had to be thinking, innovative, and as additive, and NaturalMat has been quite revolutionary in the way that they have providing their different materials to build up their mattresses. And so we reached out to them and said, You know, this is what we are trying to achieve. And actually, today, if we really want to do some massive changes, we believe we have to collaborate across industries. And be and think a little bit above, just sort of like the day to day, you know, and what we set out to do goal wise, our mission and so on.
We actually became really good friends with the guys running NaturalMat, and we had to persuade them that you know, guys, come on, let's work together. And let's try to, to do things in a way that is not necessarily the conventional way of doing things.
Benchmark Furniture
I do think that we're all going to make a lot more difference if we collaborate more. And if we, if we have as much openness and transparency about what we're doing. So we have a rule here, anybody can come and visit our workshops, you know, industry competent competitors, whatever, they can come and see what we do and how we do it. Because on our on our own, we're going to make very little change. But if we can help lead away and and larger and perhaps more influential businesses, financially influential businesses can can see that there's a way forward and follow suit, then, then we're going to be very happy to have shared that knowledge.
Laerke Sutcliffe
We do also on our website, we actually share our composition of how we managed to put together our post street at the end, because that was also quite a process of finding both comfort and, and sort of actually meeting the first fire retardant natural fire retardant within the build up of the structure. So we did put quite a lot of sort of testing and effort into getting there. And as shown saying, instead of sort of, you know, could putting a copyright and sort of being proud about it.
We actually say, guys, give us a call. This is how you do it, we show it on the website, and yeah, very open to share. And I think it's also important to mention that we you know, we have walked the walk and come a long way, we still have a lot to do, and we will keep walking. But we are never, never trying to look or come across as the expert in the industry, but more the sharing people that we hope you will follow. If that makes sense.
Matt Morley
Talk to us a bit about the OVO furniture collection because from outside it looks like it's encompassing a lot of your values and the principles behind the business in one - is it sort of the furthest you've gone so far in terms of delivering on that?
Benchmark Furniture
Yes, the OVO range was the first of our core ranges that we did for environmental product declarations on and it for me It embodies the very best of design and I think the design is the best of modern design. It's simple. It's tactile, it’s biophilic, you just feel good in its presence, you want to stroke it. It's non toxic. In its consistency in its materials, it has a measured embodied carbon declared on it. And in almost all cases, other than the leather upholstery pieces, it's, it gives us a sort of net carbon store or people even call it carbon negative, but we call it a net carbon store value.
I think it does embody the best of of what we do. But we've extended the environmental product declarations now to many more products. And we've had some external consultants write algorithms that enable us to do this in a simpler way, we still have to have the figures verified by third party peer reviewed, but it does enable it to be more streamlined. And it is a bit burdensome, and a lot of businesses just cannot see how they would ever do it. But the processes are becoming simpler.
Models are being built that will enable makers of anything really to do this, and it's just gonna be very valuable. I hope a time will come when we will base taxation of products, not on an arbitrary figure of the of the pecuniary value but on their carbon cost - being a much more real cost as we face You know, the climate situation we we face. So, I think that that it's really important the sharing of knowledge and the making it easier for businesses to to produce lifecycle assessments or environmental product declarations.
Matt Morley
There may not be government level legislation yet around targets for the carbon impact of furniture in a new workplace. Let's say if that workplace or the owner, the real estate developer signs up for a LEED certification process and indeed the well process there then, in a sense that provides that structure that then gives additional credits and effectively encourages the industry. And someone like myself was specifying which furniture should be put into these 12 floors of offices.
Were then out looking for brands, businesses, products, such as they have a collection that have that epd behind them, and they're then rewarded with credits on the on the overall project score. So I think there is a commercial angle to it, if anyone's still not convinced that it is the purely the right thing to do. When one is aligned with LEED or BREEM certification, one of these systems, there are literally points scored for purchasing products that have these EPDs. And that seems to be the best we have in terms of nudging the industry in the right direction.
You mentioned biophilic design, and it's typically referenced for entire spaces, and a lot of people think of effectively plants. But I'm big advocate for biophilic design being much more about things like texture, colours, patterns and natural fabrics.
Unusually though, you mentioned it in the context of your furniture. So from where you sit, how does this trend if we can call it that reflect a shift towards a more natural approach to interiors? How are your pieces talking that language of nature?
Benchmark Furniture
So our pieces of furniture do speak as a very natural piece because principally, they're made of wood and as human beings, our oldest and most trusted relationship with any material is with wood. It is the most in any survey done anywhere in the world at any time. Wood is the material that gets the greatest amount of trust and credibility from the buying public.
I just believe I know that we react very well. When we can see that something's made of wood and preferably have solid wood. The fact that we can touch it, the fact that we can feel the grain we can see the grain it just takes us into a natural world. There are all sorts of measures that that are starting to be done or on the the brains reaction in relation to to nature and there is some science We're starting to get some science that is actually able to pinpoint, specifically which parts of our brain react well.
But I'm also a great believer in instinct. And I regard instinct as being a little more than the sort of distillation of 1000s or hundreds of 1000s of years of experience in existence of the race. If our instinct is to accept and trust and feel good in the presence of material, then you're probably right. And we don't give enough credit to instinct we tend to look for, for sort of scientific explanations for everything, and yet we accept that instinct exists within the way a whale migrates or swallow returns to its nesting site, we accept that instinct exists, but in everything except human beings.
I think we should listen a little more to our instinct, and everybody feels better, closer to nature. And if that closer to nature means sitting at a wooden table and feeling a piece of wood, or sleeping in a wooden bed, or having a wooden floor, a wooden wall, then that's also beneficial.
Laerke Sutcliffe
I think, also more indirect, for instance, our new collection, our new fabric collection, has aspects of biophilic by the fact that it's created in in natural materials and without the need of any fire retardant treatment. So aspects like that, that, you know, if you keep if you're building up products are spaces with only materials this either, yeah, natural or not, in need of any toxicity for any treatment. That layers up, in my opinion, they biophilic design.
So I think but as you're saying that biophilic design is quite often misunderstood by you know, just at the very end of the project, you putting a few sort of plants, in plastic pots around the green wall, the green, green wall, you know, it sticks much deeper than that, then then then then in how you are creating a space in layers.
Matt Morley
I noticed one of your previous projects was the Maggie’s Center in Manchester, I had the opportunity to collaborate with Lily Jencks, the daughter of the late Maggie on one of my early projects and Lily, a landscape architect created a wonderful green gym space for us. And I when I saw that you'd also been involved on a Maggie center in Manchester, I just thought what a great one an obvious connection and so fitting.
So perhaps you could just describe a little bit the involvement there because again, I think there's a real connection with with biophilic design and creating a nurturing space and it's essentially a cancer care center. So a place where it's real mission, its purpose is to nourish and calm and relieve anxiety.
Benchmark Furniture
Yeah, I'm I'm a huge fan of the Maggie's charity and Charles Jencks his vision. After Maggie's work, it was Maggie's vision in her own lifetime, having suffered that, that sort of shock of being diagnosed with cancer, and you walk out of the oncology department in some big hospital, and where do you go? Where do you take that shock. And their vision was that you take it into a Maggie center, and that these centers should seek in every way to sort of calm and reassure and comfort you. And nature is in their view, and I would share it entirely the greatest comfort at that moment. And so all Maggie centers are built as much as possible in natural materials. They have gardens, they have a big kitchen table where you can give away which encourages a sense of community and sharing of your that moment and of of your diagnosis or treatment afterwards. And so we've actually been involved in a lot of Maggie's projects Manchester was was one of them, which was a foster and partners project. But we've done a lot of the Maggie centers and I think that sadly, I'm Charles Jencks has he's died there, but the the charity continues, and Garner's a lot of goodwill for very good work, but it is that central thing of putting nature at the heart of a building, whether it be through gardens, planting, natural materials, tactility shape form, and undoubtedly every Maggie's that I've ever been into Give a feeling of wellness sort of ironic when actually tend to be rather full of people who are unwell with cancer. But but the the physical environment is a very well environment.
Matt Morley
There's then also the topic of, of circularity and circular economy and durability and something that one can really sense with with your work is that no doubt due to impart to the vertical integration to the level of craftsmanship to the quality of the products and materials, something that's going to last.
And you've really committed to that with this idea of almost sort of a take back scheme at the end which connects with the idea of circular economy and I'm a big fan of this, I think pretty much everyone needs to get on board. But it seems to be a slow takeoff. How have you adopted that approach? And what have you learned so far from that?
Benchmark Furniture
So I think our stance on this started with with the concept of lifetime repair. What we make is inherently durable, because we operate with high levels of craftsmanship, and hopefully good design, where durability is built in and designed in. But the concept of lifetime repair. I think it was it was probably Patagonia and Yvon Chouinard, and in my awareness of the work that he'd done on it, I thought, well, that's all free.
So of course, we should offer lifetime repair, it's an easy thing to do. So that was the starting point. And then the circularity argument, as it's gained momentum over the last 10 years or so, really took us beyond that to what is a relatively new initiative for us of take back scheme, where anybody who owns our furniture, we do have geographic limitations, which are just for the purpose of the practicality of recovering and bringing it back.
But essentially, within this moment, we operate it within the UK, we can collect there for if it's no longer required, it is no longer relevant, useful. Or the or the circumstances of the owner have just changed. We can take it back, we can give it a value depending on the condition of it, which is then issued as a credit against more furniture that we can supply.
But then what we take back, we seek to either repair, refurbish, repurpose, reuse, or at worst recycle. And because it's all natural materials, they're recyclable. And so in order to, to offer that and do that, you have to think at the design stage and the making stage about well, how easy is it to repair, how easy to take it apart? when this comes back to us, you know, are we going to be able to take it apart until you start to think even when you're making it for the first time about how you're going to remake it or repurpose it or refurbish it.
There's nothing new I mean, you know, it's it's centuries old, the concept that that furniture should be able to reuse and repurpose it was you know, furniture used to be the one of the very high value items that any household owned. And so it had to be transportable, it had to be repairable and somehow we lost sight of that.
So we're only really seeking to reintroduce something that that has been around. But yes, it's it's an exciting, it's an exciting new avenue for us. And it also hopefully will bring a new audience to us because there will be this, this body of furniture that's available for for resale, refurbished furniture for resale. And that hopefully will bring us new customers as well. So we will I hope it's good business as well as good for the world.
Laerke Sutcliffe
But also as you say, it sort of starts already from the product development point of view. So we have a when we start new projects we just about to go into a new product development process this month. And when we start out a collaboration like that, we have a wheel that we sort of measuring all the or the starting process and all the way through really up against this wheel. And one of those is but if it's gonna last the life time, how do we then you know, how where do we start? So I think it's definitely starting from the very beginning that we are considering all of those different aspects which is ending up being there. They sort of finish it finished product,
Matt Morley
Effectively shouldering the responsibility for waste creation upfront in the production process in the design process because you know, you're taking ownership of that rather than designing and saying, Well, someone else can worry about what happens when it when it's finished when it when it's no longer needed.
Benchmark Furniture
Yes, but I'd also say we don't look upon it as perhaps waste creation, because what we take back is never waste. I mean, what we take back has opportunity, it has repurposing it, it has a resale, it has a lot of inherent embodied values still in it more than just the materials for recycling. So I'm the very, very last resort would be conversion into biomass fuel. But, but that would be the absolute last resort. So I really try to think that I would like to think that nothing we make ever ends up as waste, it just ends up as another kind of resource.
Matt Morley
Which is the takes us back to the wonderful circle rather than a linear, hopefully, hopefully, in some is admirable work. It's pretty great stuff. So you've obviously got retail collections, you also working with interior designers and architects, how are people connecting with you? Where are you present in the world?
Benchmark Furniture
People connect with us, I mean, I suppose our primary link is through the architectural community we've worked with, we're lucky enough to work with many of the world's biggest best and or most forward thinking architects. And so that is one of the major connections with the world.
We also deal with the furniture dealerships who have historically not been at the forefront of either either sustainable practice, you know, they'd be more interested in flogging a lot of furniture, then then what happens to it is lifestyle is the date its lifetime use. But actually that is changing. And pretty much all the dealerships are now having to engage in the argument.
And they have this whole, sustainable and circularity of health and wellbeing aspects now bigger, much higher in their customers buying profile. And so the dealerships are having to take that on board as well. That's another network that we that we operate through. And then I think just through the world of, of people who are interested in sustainability people like yourself, people like the planted, planted cities group that are looking at how we improve circularity, the way we view the products we consume.
Matt Morley
The good part there is that there's there's very little imagine sales process because the work speaks for itself. And there's a shared value system that one can just tap into and connect with because it's in one sense universal, although we wish it was slightly wider spread, of course, but for those of us who have bought into it and have adopted it as our worldview it's and we connect with see what you do, it's there is no conversion process required. It's just completely smooth. Well, that completely connects with how I see the world. And that's, I think, where the real value is.