Skip to content My name is Jonathan. Back in 2016 my family left Kent, fell in love with the Devon countryside, and bought a cobbled farmhouse beside a stream twenty minutes outside of Plymstock. We live here, we work here, and every kitchen we have made since moving here has begun at our kitchen table.
There are five of us — my son Daniel, my wife Julie and two apprentices who’ve been trained by myself. We build kitchens and cabinetry by hand, inspired by the English country houses that surround us. The old farmhouses, the flagstone floors, the painted dressers, the rooms that nobody designed and everybody loved. That’s the feeling we try to put into everything that leaves this workshop: quiet, reserved and rooted in local heritage.
We’re a small operation. We intend to stay that way.
I draw my inspiration from a very specific version of England. The one where the Aga has been on since October and won’t go off until April. Where the flagstone floor is cold underfoot at six in the morning and the butler sink is deep enough to wash a dog in. Where the rods are stacked in the porch next to the wax jackets, and somebody has left their muddy boots on the wrong side of the door again.
It is the England of church spires visible from the footpath, of horses in the field behind the house, of Cornish fishing boats coming in on a grey morning with the smell of salt and diesel in the air. It is not a romantic fantasy — it is the life that thousands of people across Devon and Cornwall actually live, quietly and contentedly, every single day. These are the homes we build for.
The kitchens at the centre of that life — built to take the mud and the fish and the flowers from the garden and the wet dog and the Sunday roast — and still be the most beautiful room in the house.
Our founder, and father of the family, Jonathan picked up his first tools at nineteen in London. It wasn’t easy — a young man with a passion for making things and very little else, trying to find his footing in a city that doesn’t slow down for anyone. The Prince’s Trust saw something in him, sponsored him, and gave him the platform to launch his first company — a handcrafted mirror business built entirely by his own hands.
He taught himself, bought his own machinery, and spent his twenties making furniture — wardrobes, chests of drawers, pieces built to last. By thirty-one he had founded Canary Woodwork, taking on kitchens and larger commissions across the Canary Islands. In 2016 he packed up and moved his family to Devon, drawn by the countryside, the history, and a slower way of doing things.
It’s here that we founded Chelsey Rose – a small team in a quiet village crafting what we do best: traditional english kitchens and bespoke cabinetry.
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