“I’ve been in the building industutry for most of my adult life, predominantly as a kitchen fitter.
It was back in 2013 when I decided that I didn’t really want to be fitting kitchens anymore… Instead, I’d rather spend my time doing what I enjoyed the most which was planning and designing them.
I thought the best way to do this would be to get a job, so in March of that year I secured a position with A National Kitchen Supplier based in the north of England. I’d be visiting potential customers in their homes throughout South Wales and South West England, designing and selling high-end kitchens… My dream job!… or so I thought.
It soon became apparent that their definition of ‘high end’ differed greatly from mine… I’d fitted hundreds of kitchens in my career from entry level ‘off-the-shelf’ furniture to bespoke ‘hand-made’ works of art and their kitchens were mediocre at best. But the price tag… Well that was high-end!
Instead of feeling happy whenever I sold a kitchen, I just felt guilty that I’d saddled someone with years of debt for a kitchen that I could have sourced at a fraction of the price. Needles to say, after just 3 months I decided that this wasn’t the job for me which was when my idea for Artisan Interiors was born…
Although I didn’t enjoy my time with that company, the good thing that came out of it was that it forced me change my van for a car. This made it more difficult for me to take the easy route and go back on the tools. Instead I decided I would create my own company that would design, supply and install kitchens that were not only fantastic quality but, above all, great value for money too. So… in July 2013, I formed Artisan Interiors Ltd.
One of the first things I did was call a friend of mine, Danny Borge, who I’d met a couple of years earlier mountain biking. Danny was a carpenter who loved fitting kitchens and was the perfect choice to team up with on my future projects. I’d design and supply the kitchens and he’d project manage the installation side of things. Although he was pretty busy with his own projects at the time, the lure of working exclusively with kitchens was too great and in 2016 Danny became a partner in Artisan Interiors Ltd.”
“It was in March 2016 that we visited the KBB Show in Birmingham. We’d been talking about setting up a workshop in Cardiff where we would manufacture top quality kitchens ourselves so the timing was perfect to speak to potential suppliers at the show.
What we didn’t expect was to be completely bowled over by a German Kitchen Manufacturer that would make us drop every plan we’d had about manufacturing our own kitchens and instead focus all of our efforts on opening a showroom to sell their kitchens instead… The German Manufacturer exibiting that day was of course, Schüller…
So that’s what we did… We secured our retail unit on Penarth Road, Cardiff in July 2016, a date that my wife remembers well as I spent our anniversary that year in Herrieden, Germany visiting Schüller headquarters (She’s forgiven me now… I think!).
By september we’d turned an empty building into a beautiful kitchen showroom and were open for business… The rest, as they say, is history.”
The day we got the keys…
Our first visit to Schüller HQ
The Grand Opening
