Pew Shelves
Material: Reclaimed sapele church pews · Origin: Manchester
The Brief
Ollie and Abbie had recently moved into their new home and were looking for ways to give it some character. As avid collectors of curiosities and objects with provenance, they were drawn to the idea of a centrepiece for their living room, built from material that already carried a story of its own. It was this search that led them to Fig.
At the time, we had just rescued a large number of pews from a church in Manchester that was sadly closing its doors. Several of these sat on the upper gallery and could not be removed without first being taken apart, which left us with a good quantity of beautifully seasoned sapele, a tropical hardwood regularly used throughout the 20th century for its beauty and resilience. Half a century of use by the congregation had given the timber a depth of colour and patina that simply cannot be replicated in new wood.
The Design
As lovers of mid-century design, and with an abundance of material from a mid-century church, the design quickly became a collaborative process. Ollie and Abbie had shared a set of mitred shelf brackets they admired, and their shape drew us towards a part of the pews which had not yet revealed its values. Beneath each bench sat a pivoting arm that once held the kneelers. Removed and carefully mitred together, these could form a smooth, continuous curve between the two components. The original fixing holes were left on show, each still ringed by the mark of a washer, worn in from the countless times the kneelers had been lowered and raised.
The pew seats, reused as the shelves themselves, fitted the room astonishingly well, which meant the rounded ends and old fixing marks could remain part of this new iteration. Every component, from the uprights to the brackets and boards, was reclaimed from the same set of pews.
The Result
What we like most about the piece is how little of its history has been hidden. The washer rings, fixing holes and softened edges are all still there to be read, now supporting a collection of objects with stories of their own. In that sense, the shelves feel less like a new piece of furniture and more like the next chapter in the life of the timber, and a fair reflection of the kind of work we love doing at Fig.
