Hollywood’s favourite Welsh woodworker
Mark Boddington started out as a small-scale whittler, but now his bespoke design firm, Silverlinings, has an international celebrity following
Mark Boddington hasn’t done too badly for a man who failed his A-levels and had to turn his childhood hobby — “messing about with wood” — into a career. “I needed As and Bs to become a land manager,” he says, chuckling. “And I got a D and Es. So it was pretty clear I had to do something else.”
It was his mother who encouraged him to whittle, the 58-year-old furniture-maker says. As a child of the war, she had become adept at making do and inspired him to do the same. Aged five he was making bowls from branches and aged seven he built a bookcase — “albeit with screws and nails, which we would never use now,” he says. He was also privileged to grow up surrounded by beautiful things. His maternal great-great-grandfather, George Rae, was a patron of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and owned one of the greatest collections of works by Dante Gabriel Rossetti, many of which are in an exhibition at Tate Britain. His wealthy paternal great-great-grandfather collected pieces made by the Century Guild, many of which are now in the V&A.
Since he started to make his own works of beauty after graduating from Parnham College in 1985, his company has attracted fans from Hollywood stars and Chinese billionaires to Middle Eastern royalty. David Bowie and Iman were early clients of Silverlining, then Madonna, Tom Ford and Kevin Costner. “Sadly, in the age of NDAs, I can’t tell you any others,” he says. “But we have had nine high-profile projects we can’t talk about in the past four years.”
Like his competitors — David Linley and Marc Fish in the UK, Joseph Walsh in Ireland and Frank Pollaro in New York — Silverlining can create pretty much whatever their clients want. “Making magic” is how Boddington describes the process, in materials that might be walnut — “if we can get it; those old woods are getting increasingly difficult,” he says — or steel covered with cactus resin or dyed woven straw or lustrous polished shells.
What the furniture maker won’t use is wood that’s endangered or a material that’s unsustainable or toxic. Everything, he says, has to be ethically sourced. A cork farmer in Portugal, for instance, supplies “beautiful pieces, with 10mm square cells, and characterful surfaces”. Local growers provide pine, which can be stripped of its yellow colour and transformed into “something pale and rather beautiful”. Leather comes from J&FJ Baker in Devon, which, he says, is one of the oldest oak bark tanneries in Europe. “It was there before the Romans arrived,” he says.
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The reason that they can make pieces that are unlike anyone else’s, he claims, is because his team of 70 are hugely innovative. The company has an “innovation Friday” once a month, during which they can all experiment, resulting in real one-offs. A bar that they made recently, for instance, costing a client £375,000, was shaped like a delicate arum lily; another piece, a contemporary table made from a 248-year-old oak, was lacquered and threaded with 160 micro-LEDs. Many are hugely labour-intensive: a hand-sculpted desk carved from a single walnut tree took one craftsman 4,500 hours to make.
Brexit hit them hard because 98 per cent of what they make is exported and they lost 17 “very talented European members of staff.” However, orders keep coming in, hence his decision to expand his Welsh factory and incorporate a furniture museum and visitor centre where clients can watch pieces being made, using high-tech robots, laser cutters and 3D printers as well as traditional saws and planes.
Boddington has also opened an academy, where trainees hone their skills by making a range of accessories using factory offcuts. So far, they have made trinket trays, glasses cases, leather vases, and baskets woven from willow and leather — all of which, he says, “have had a hugely positive response”, and will be sold online from May.
Having started out working on the estate owned by the Duke of Westminster, and on the Marquis of Cholmondeley’s, he is enjoying having his own empire. “We’re doing well — and Ryan Reynolds has bought the local football club, which has put this part of north Wales on the map. We couldn’t be happier.”
The Rossettis is at Tate Britain until September 24, tate.org.uk; silverlining.co.uk
