From back shed, to shipping nation wide

Heath Polkinghorne, founder of Timberwolf Design, in the Henley Beach workshop in front of stacked timber boards.

I'm Heath Polkinghorne, founder of Timberwolf Design. We design and make solid timber furniture in Adelaide. Clean lines, traditional joinery, modern proportions.

From a backyard shed.

The first workshop was a 3 × 2 metre shed at the back of a Henley Beach property. Most of the early pieces left through that doorway one at a time, finished in the same room they were built in. Tools and timber competed for floor space; orders came from a handful of people who'd seen one piece and asked about another.

By 2019 the work had outgrown two more spaces and landed in the current Henley Beach workshop, ten minutes from the airport, under one roof with the showroom. The space changed; the way the pieces are built didn't.

The Timberwolf Design team seated around a solid-timber round table in their Henley Beach showroom. — Heath leads the build alongside four other makers. Every piece carries the marks of the bench it was built on, and the people who built it.

Solid timber. No shortcuts.

Every piece is made from solid Australian and American hardwoods: American Oak, Tasmanian Oak, American Walnut, American Maple. No veneers, no MDF cores, no engineered substitutes. Mortise-and-tenon joinery where modern furniture would settle for screws and dowels. Hand-routed fluting on the pieces that ask for it.

The result is furniture made to order, one piece at a time. Every order starts with a piece from our collection; from there, you choose size, timber, and finish before we begin. Lead times sit at ten to twelve weeks from deposit, the time real wood and real joinery actually take.

Jordan cutting solid panels precisely to length.

Cory hand sawing wedged-tenon joints flush, for a Murphie Dining Table.

How a piece
gets made

Made to order, from the collection. The workshop is small, so the makers building your piece are the people you deal with, from the first drawing to the day it's delivered.

Choose

Every piece starts as a design from the collection: a dining table, a credenza, a bed. From there it's made to order: you choose the dimensions, the timber and the finish, and we keep the proportions and joinery as drawn. Tell us the space, your timber leaning and your timeline, and we reply within two business days.

Design & Quote

We send scaled drawings so you can see the piece at your sizes and give you a fixed quote, valid for thirty days. A 50% deposit books your place in the build schedule.

Craft

Then it's time on the bench. Each piece is cut, joined and finished by hand in our Henley Beach workshop over ten to twelve weeks, solid hardwood throughout, no veneers, mortise-and-tenon joinery built to outlast the room. We deliver to capital cities and install in person across metropolitan Adelaide.

Made by hand,
in Australia

Enquire