Five questions with a furniture maker.

We spent a morning in a workshop that smells of oak and linseed, asking a maker of twenty years what he has learned. Here are five answers, lightly edited.

On time: "A piece tells you when it is finished. The mistake is finishing it before then because a deadline said so."

On materials: "Good wood is honest. It moves, it marks, it ages. If you want something that never changes, buy plastic — and be sad."

On tools: "I keep four chisels on the bench. I own forty. The bench tells the truth about what you actually use."

On failure: "Every joint I have ruined taught me more than the ones that worked. We just don't photograph those."

On keeping: "Make things people repair instead of replace. That is the whole job, really."