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Tell us a little about yourselves and Heaven and Stubbs, how the company was born and how you came up with the idea of your own bespoke kitchen company?
Howard was making Occasional tables from the age of 16 and selling them from the shop window where his mother worked in Yorkshire, a love of carpentry, a good old-fashioned solid apprenticeship and four years in marketing and sales – a background that created the perfect blueprint for a bespoke furniture business that’s now nearly 20 years old.
It was 1995 when partners Stuart Heaven and Howard Stubbs joined forces to create their very first company, Heaven and Stubbs. For Howard, it was the realisation of a lifetime’s dream.
“Stuart and I worked seven days a week, often through the night to establish our business. Then, after learning the ups and downs associated with its set up, we decided that we needed to focus on what we wanted to be good at –bespoke furniture.”
Heaven and Stubbs has been established for over 2 decades. During that time, it has built a reputation for quality and service that extends well beyond it’s Oxfordshire base, working with discerning homeowners and design professionals on some of the finest homes in the UK.
Flexibility of design and extent of service means that Heaven & Stubbs can either work directly with the homeowner or the professional designer, on a single room project or to completely renovate an entire home’s interior. This could encompass all room requirements, as well as other associated architectural features to include interior doors, skirting, architrave, wall panelling and many more features besides.
Custom design and cabinet size flexibility means that every project is ideally tailored to suit individual tastes and requirements as well as architectural proportions.
We have a new home office showroom in our Farthinghoe location, a new kitchen showroom will open in our Farthinghoe too Summer 2021.
What makes you different from the competition?
Im not the type of person to get stuck in a rut, I like change, so I’m constantly pushing to improve, the product, the service and most of all making sure clients are happy!
Always working on R&D to get a better product, a product that lasts the test of time, just
This week I have come back in to contact with clients that we did these projects 12-15 years ago locally, the kitchens are in amazing shape, we offer a service on all our furniture to keep it fresh and working like it should, why, well you use your kitchen more than any other room so it needs looking after, so we suggest every 4-5 years we can spend a day refreshing things.
Due to our in house paint finish we can use paints that outlast any hand painted finish, most hand painted finishes start to look tired after a short amount of time. We also have some trade secrets that also make our furniture look so much better, crisper, with no cracking and twisting with us, but like I say, they are trade secrets!
We have 60, 5 Star reviews on houzz.com and have the best of houzz 2021.
How has the Brackley community received your products?
We go far and wide with our installation, this is because 90% of our work comes from recommendation, as an example we designed and installed a kitchen in Brackley and as a result of how happy they where they recommended us to a family member in Devon on so on, this has escalated to Wales, Yorkshire, London, even the south of France.
So we always start local and go with the flow.
If someone wanted to branch out and get a new kitchen, what would you suggest their first steps should be? (is it budget, style etc. suggesting they might not need a full new kitchen, just a few upgrades?)
Firstly it’s important to decipher if you need a bespoke kitchen, there are thousands of “off the peg” kitchen companies, if you can get what you want from them you will save money as this is a mass produced product, but the reason we are so busy on a yearly basic is because a lot of people cannot find anything that ticks their box, or they have a difficult space and standard just won’t work, or you just want the best quality.
We offer a design service that is second to none, with 26 years of experience in kitchens, utility, boot rooms, studies, libraries and more.
What’s in store for the future? Are you planning to expand or grow in any way? (Maybe bring out a new range? / service?)
A lot… We are currently working on a new showroom at our Farthinghoe site for home study-office and kitchen, we also have plans to extend our offering at our Adderbury site also to include more kitchen showroom and home study-office.
Your ‘office’ – anyplace where your magic happens. My office at home is where I can get creative as its located at the bottom of my garden, very quiet, a place you can submerge yourself in to a design to make the most of the room.
What is your favourite style of kitchen and why?
My Favourite kitchen is the one I created for my family in 2017, this was the first proper kitchen I have had since we started in 1996, my wife and I have four children a dog and a cat so a space we can all work and live well together, a large open plan kitchen that connects to a living and dining area as one, with views across the Oxfordshire countryside with large sliding glass doors.
Great for cooking, relaxing, eating and entertaining, when that’s possible!
The first kitchen I made, in Situ back in 1996, from a pile of wood in the client’s home…
What's your favourite finished refurb of all time?
This is one of my favourite projects we completed early 2020, this old house near Milton Keynes needed a sympathetic kitchen to go with the character of this home.
We also completed a library book casing in another room.
Here we have the Dick Frances Archive Library, we designed and made this back in 2010 for the local Author Felix Frances, boasting a two story library with a secret bookcase door, and a matching office where the novels are written.
