LAURA WILLIAMSON

Talk to Wanaka woodworker Simon King even for a short while, and you’re sure to learn something interesting. For example, did you know all good cabinets have a secret compartment? They are not always hard to find, but they are always tricky to open.

Simon works out of his workshop on Ballantyne Road making a combination of domestic woodwork products which he sells at the markets in Wanaka and Queenstown: beautifully-crafted native beech bowls, stirrers, rolling pins, honey drippers and chopping boards - and bespoke furniture to order. He also teaches adult night classes over the course of which students learn the techniques to make a woodwork item, such as chair or a stool, to take home.

Visiting his workshop, packed as it is with furniture, offcuts, machines, and tools hanging from every wall, all of it coated in wood-scented sawdust, it’s hard to believe he’s been working there full-time for less than a year.

Until the start of this school year, Simon had been the Head of Design Technology at Mount Aspiring College for 11 years, as well as a teacher of Spatial and Product Design, Visual Art Design and Woodwork. He dropped to part time hours in 2015 to get his woodwork business off the ground, and planned to carry on into this year, but "things just got too busy.” He went into the woodwork business full-time part way through Term One, and he hasn’t stopped since.

Simon grew up in Dunedin, then went straight from school to train to be a civil engineer at Canterbury University. He never studied woodworking, but instead learned as he went. "I started working with a friend who was a beekeeper at Carey's Bay near Dunedin, and used to help him make beekeeping equipment. Later, when my father retired, he decided he wanted to go to woodturning classes and he asked me if I wanted to come along. Soon, I was doing better work than my instructor and selling it, and Dad had given up.”

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He attributes his success to being both a quick learner with practical things, and to having a good eye for form. "I wasn’t trained to be a designer, but it came naturally to me. And I’m a visual learner, which helped,” he said. And while he didn’t take art classes, he was involved with photography while at university and was a member of the photographic society.

Simon has worked as a woodworker once before, more than 20 years ago, where he said he earned a "precarious” living in Dunedin, sharing space and equipment with three other woodworkers. He got into teaching when he was asked by a friend who was a woodwork teacher to do some relieving ("in those days they were less fussy about whether you had qualifications”), and with a young family to help support including a seven-year-old son and another baby on the way, he went to teachers’ college. His daughter Eleanor was two weeks old when he graduated.

He worked in a succession of relieving positions in Dunedin until his partner Jenny was offered a position by the New Zealand's International Aid and Development Agency teaching in Rarotonga. Simon ended up teaching design and woodwork there for two years. He was also involved in a project on Mauke, a two- by three-kilometre island in the Cook Islands. "There was a community of disabled kids there, and we built a sheltered workshop where the mothers could come together and work while their children got looked after. I designed a lot jewellery for them to make out of shell and coconut to sell in Rarotonga, got them all the gear they need from New Zealand, including a drill press, and taught them how to use them. That was really rewarding.”

Four years teaching in West Auckland followed, an experience he described as very "Outrageous Fortune”, before the job in Wanaka came up. He said he kept up the woodworking throughout his time as a teacher. "l was always doing a bit of this on the side, because I have a creative urge that needs to be fed,” he said. "Although teaching is creative in its own way, I still need to make something tangible.”

These days, his paid work and his creative side are one. He said his passion is designing and making bespoke furniture. A recent example is a wine cabinet, square on one side, curved on the other, its elements - cabinets, shelves, a wine rack - crafted in different types of wood with different colours, from dark, to light and to red-tinged, and seamlessly fitted together. He said the thinking behind its design came from a challenge he used to give his own students, asking them to identify what made a design a distinctly New Zealand one, especially in a modern environment where young designers can go online to look at, and be influenced by, thousands of international styles. "My cabinet adopts the colours of the marae, red and black, while the tongue and groove panelling is a nod to New Zealand’s

colonial past.

"The rest is just my imagination. The form, the curves, the way the elements are proportioned, that’s me.”  His work really does stand out, and Simon said he has two distinctive skills that are not necessarily common in modern woodwork. One is inlay work and the other is steam bending, which allows him to use one piece of work to make elements like curved legs for stools and chairs and rockers. "Once you have that technique at your fingertips, it opens up design possibilities,” he said.

As for the wine cabinet, yes it does have a secret compartment, and it takes a while to figure out how to open it.

PHOTO: Wanaka App