RETAILER PROFILE | H Miller Bros
Howard Miller (left) and Hugh Miller (above)
woodworker and furniture des- igner, you can be sure that the kitchens they produce will be far from run-of-the-mill. And that is certainly true for H Miller Bros. Brothers Howard and Hugh Miller joined forces to form the company in May 2019 and moved into workshop premises in Liverpool’s Baltic Triangle – the city’s trendy creative quarter. They had worked together on various projects before that over the preceding eight years,
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The MILLERS’ tale W
Brothers Howard and Hugh Miller – one an architect and the other a master woodworker – came together in 2019 to form H Miller Bros in Liverpool. Chris Frankland finds out more about this unusual pooling of talents
hen an architect and designer comes to- gether with a master
sharing the same office and workshop. Older brother Howard is a trained architect, designer and landscape designer, while Hugh is a furniture maker and master woodworker. Of course, the duo hardly imagined that less than a year after they started up a virus would plunge us all into a nationwide lockdown. Howard recalls: “We didn’t stop working through the pandemic. We’re very small and lean and that helps and we’re not looking to do hundreds of kitchens. The projects we do probably have a slightly longer lead-in time and are higher-value [between £40,000
and £90,000], which means that we can weather short-term storms a little bit more easily than a larger business might. It has caused innumerable frustrations over the past six months, but from a business strategy point of view, it’s not changed anything.” It had its advantages, too, as Hugh explains: “When we were in lockdown, the guy who had been working for us for a while left and so we replaced him with a new member of staff and we found there were a lot of woodworkers who had been made redundant from bigger operations, who were very highly skilled and very attracted to
what we were doing – bespoke high- end woodwork. A lot of woodworkers are much more skilled than the type of work they are creating. We were able to take our pick. “Our new maker, Christoph, is a real professional woodworker and this was so successful that we are now looking to recruit a second professional woodworker to join the team, as well as an intern through the Kickstarter scheme – so we will be up to five within six months.”
Skilled staff to work alongside Hugh are vital for H Miller Bros as its furniture is created 100% in-house, by hand,
· December 2020
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