As designers and manufacturers of exquisite bespoke, furniture, kitchens and interiors, we place a great deal of importance on the quality of the raw materials and hardware that we use in our products. There is nothing worse than spending hours designing and days or weeks making something beautiful only to have it ruined by substandard constituent parts – and we won’t tolerate that for our clients either. With several decades of experience behind us, we have built strong relationships with a small number of core suppliers we completely trust to provide us with the very best their industry can offer and we felt it was time to celebrate ‘6 of the Best’.

4: SCF Hardware

Whilst everyone here at Simon Thomas Pirie Ltd love to create stunning items from wood, we have to concede that here are some things which are better made from other materials! Hinges, drawer runners and lighting need to be used to create the efficiency and effects that we and our customers demand from fine crafted furniture and kitchens. Fortunately, we are very lucky to have a top quality hardware and finishes supplier very local to us in the form of SCF Hardware who operate from their warehouse just a few miles away in Wimborne Minster.

Parlour cabinet with lighting and hardware from SCF

SCF were founded in 1988 by their Managing Director, Les Harrogate, originally to supply fixings and hardware to the then flourishing pine furniture industry. Working alongside high quality kitchen, bedroom and furniture designers and makers, it has always been their mission to provide fantastic customer service and so, as fashions in furniture diverted away from the softwoods of the ’70s and ’80s and towards the manufactured board and solid hard woods of the ’90s and 2000s, the range and diversity of the products they supplied grew.

The team at SCF Hardware

Our experience with SCF is that they are true to their mission. We have been using them for our hardware for over 20 years now and one of the main reasons for that is their outstanding customer service. When Simon has designed something innovative or a client requests an unusual feature, we know we can pick up the phone to Chris Harrogate (Les’s son), or any of his team, and discuss which hinges or runners will work best, whether pocket or sliding door mechanism will fit or if touch or wave switches will work best in a cabinet. More importantly still, if they don’t have anything that quite fits the bill in stock, he will go away and find someone who makes something which might be useful and orders a sample so we can see the real thing and make an informed judgement about what works best.

Projects using SCF Hardwares lighting, drawer systems and hinges

As Chris explains, “This way we can build an understanding of each of our customers’ needs and requirements to ensure we supply quality products to suit each project individually. We have always seen ourselves as a One Stop Shop and continue to source new items to offer our customers the latest innovative ranges.” And this has certainly been our experience with working with SCF Hardware. We were enormously grateful to them for their support both during and in the aftermath of the Covid 19 epidemic throughout which they displayed exemplary customer care which allowed us to continue production when many businesses struggled to keep going.

Kitchen finished in Rubio wax-oil enhancing the natural beauty of oak

We are increasingly asked for furniture to be finished using products which are as planet friendly as possible and for the overall aesthetic to be, if not rustic, then certainly natural. Recently SCF have become leading stockists of Rubio Monocoat, an environmentally friendly wax-oil based finish which enhances the natural beauty of the timber and comes in an array of colours. This has been an exciting new area to work on with Chris and the SCF team, and together we have tested this in all sorts of applications. We were early adopters using Rubio Monocoat products and now we are using them on increasingly large projects like kitchens.

For our clients this relationship means that they can be assured that the hardware used in the construction of their furniture is of the very best quality, exceptionally engineered by brands such as Hafele, Blum, Sugatsume and Salice. There is always a frisson of excitement when the SCF van rolls into the courtyard as each delivery is a little Christmas with parcels of shiny new hardware to unwrap – sometimes with a new notebook or pen thrown in for good measure! Who doesn’t love a little bit of marketing kit to brighten your day?