For more than 30 years, fine woodworker Garan Hale has worked the storm-felled hardwoods of the Northern Rivers — river oak, silky oak, blue quandong, mountain oak, white cedar and camphor laurel — into furniture meant to outlast the trees they came from, with every log milled, dried and bench-finished over more than 12 months at the same Warragamba Creek workshop near Kyogle.
Hale started in the trade at the age of 8 — taught at his grandfather’s bench, where everything was made by hand — and the long arc from that childhood workshop to the Kyogle one he built himself runs through a fine-woodworking apprenticeship at Mittagong, restoration joinery on the first Australian naval vessel and several years of building classical and steel-string guitars.
The Warragamba Creek workshop houses every stage of the Designer Woodworks practice under one roof, with the band resaw, the solar kiln, the drying racks and the bench work all running off the same Northern Rivers ground Hale salvages from. The timbers come from trees that have fallen in storms, floods or old age, with logs that would otherwise be left to rot in the bush — or passed over by commercial log-truck operations — milled on site into the boards for the chairs, tables, benches and commissioned joinery that leave the workshop.
“The diversity of timbers is the greatest in the world, bar the Amazon,” Hale said in the film, with the salvage model giving him access to Northern Rivers species combinations that rarely surface in commercial furniture supply.
From log to finished piece, Hale’s process takes longer than 12 months, with the band resaw breaking each log into rough boards, followed by around a year of air-drying on the racks and a final finishing pass through the solar kiln, on the way to the workshop bench. Signature pieces such as the Daily Chair, the Out There Bench and the three-legged Stellar Stool are refined through full-scale prototypes, with the Daily Chair alone running through 13 prototypes across 7 years before reaching its production form.
Hale’s design rule is traditional and absolute, with function ranked first, structure second and aesthetic third across every piece that leaves the workshop. The hierarchy holds across the production range, from the Stellar Stool through to one-off commissioned joinery, with Hale describing well-made hardwood furniture as another form of storage that locks usable timber into cherished objects for generations.
Beyond the workshop bench, Hale and his partner Bianca van Luan are working the surrounding property at Warragamba Creek to strip out invasive species and replant native hardwoods along the creek lines, with Australian rosewood, red cedar and white beech among the slow-growing timbers that may take many decades to mature. The replanting runs alongside the salvage, with both ends of the hardwood resource held together on the one Warragamba Creek address Hale has worked for more than 30 years.
“I believe we can have it all if it’s managed well,” Hale said in the film, describing sustainability as leaving the place better than it was found and improving the resource for biodiversity, habitat and wood production. The line carries the weight of a 30-year practice still running on the same Northern Rivers ground, with the salvage, the milling, the drying and the replanting all working out of one Kyogle address.
It comes as the North East NSW Forestry Hub — one of 11 Regional Forestry Hubs established under the Commonwealth’s National Forest Industries Plan — continues to add to its video series on the people who grow, harvest, process and craft NSW native timbers, with Hub Manager Nick Cameron saying the Garan Hale film adds a fine-furniture chapter alongside earlier instalments on Coffs Harbour Hardwoods, Ironwood Taree and Machin Sawmill. “They are a living resource that supports craft, community and the landscapes they come from,” Cameron said of NSW native timbers.
Hale has worked the same Warragamba Creek workshop for more than 30 years, with every Designer Woodworks piece still leaving the bench one at a time from a region that supplies around 850,000 tonnes of hardwood logs to the NSW industry each year.
