Tom and Sarah are creating joy and new connections as well as homewares at the helm of their family business

In the 1990s, when most kids were shaking tubes of glitter over Pritt-Sticked drawings in the manner of Art Attack’s Neil Buchanan, Tom Fraser was moving in a more sophisticated creative realm. In 1985, two years before Tom was born, his parents had founded the Chippendale International School of Furniture, the first and only school in Scotland dedicated to teaching the craft of making, designing and restoring furniture. He has never known life without it.

Now, alongside his wife Sarah, Tom is nurturing a new chapter for the family business that began life in his parents’ garage before settling into the well-loved bones of a 207-year-old farmstead in the patchwork fields of East Lothian.

“My brother and I were always in Dad’s workshop, making things from wood: boxes, coffee tables, small cabinets,” he recalls. That’s the kind of practical stuff I loved doing. To me it felt perfectly normal.” Understandably so.

Tom always harboured a dream of running the school someday, but it hadn’t felt a likely outcome. For one thing, he had wound up in London working various desk jobs in the PR and finance industries. And for another, he was the younger sibling. He assumed that if anyone was to step in after his dad retired, it would be his older brother Jamie, who also worked in finance.

“Dad had always said not to feel any pressure to take this on but to go off and find our passion,” he says. “We soon realised our passion was woodworking. It’s in our blood.”

Both brothers returned to their roots and picked up the tools, securing places on the school’s flagship 30-week professional furniture-making course. Jamie then set up his own furniture business and six years ago Tom took the helm as principal at the school.

Sarah, originally from Edinburgh, and who used to work in travel PR, heads up the school’s marketing arm. “What I find amazing is that we can work together around the kids,” she says. “And we also really understand one another’s work now. Everything just makes sense.”

The couple live nearby in a colour-drenched former gardener’s cottage with their children Esme and Rafferty, and have a baby on the way. Five-year-old Esme loves drawing and Lego-obsessed Raffy, three, tells friends he wants to be “a fixer, like Daddy” when he grows up. “I think it’s important to learn how to work with your hands,” says Tom. “And it’s a joyous thing too, you know?

“I have fond memories of being taught by my dad. I’m looking forward to that bit of parenting where I can say, ‘Right, it’s the summer holidays. Let’s make a chess table’.”

Most students come to the school because they want to do something physical and concrete. They travel from all over, and range in age from 18 to 72.

Many are transitioning from other jobs, hoping to learn about themselves as much as about carpentry. “Accountants, dentists, airline pilots…” says Tom. “They want a career they can take pride in so that when someone asks at a dinner party what they do, they can return the answer with a smile.”

This is an excerpt from Homes & Interiors Scotland issue 159

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