Simon Ancher already sees a set of very fine tables. He’s planned the quarter- and back-sawn cuts and envisaged how the grain will lie. In his mind’s eye, individual sections have been flipped to provide a cathedral effect, a reflection in the finished surface of the water that gave life to the timber in the first place. 

He’s planned the structural core of these tables, and readied the tools and techniques that will bring their timber’s inner beauty to a brilliant lustre. He knows how they’ll be dissembled for transport, too, and can even see them as the centrepieces of board rooms in the multi-million-dollar Parliament Square development in Hobart.

But right now, he’s peering into the depths of Lake Pieman, the tannin-stained water masking all colour and smell, depth and distance. The beauty he seeks for these crafted tables is hidden metres below; his senses pick up nothing but the rain-swept surface of a 30-year old lake deep in Tasmania’s west.

It's mid-winter, and Simon Ancher is just weeks out from the most important deadline of his professional life. 

Why are you doing this? “It’s a common question,” says the 38-year-old furniture designer. “Certainly one I’ve asked myself about this particular commission. 

“In designing furniture, I like to go into a project with a strong idea of form and function, a vision of the end result. I’m not a woodie in the normal sense,” he says of millers and carpenters, craftsmen and women, “but I love the hands-on aspect, wanting to achieve something with a particular material. It’s always been this way,” he says, recalling his sensory memories of childhood and the tactile nature of wood. “The smells of different woods are particularly powerful, even now,” he adds.

The Ancher family, including Simon’s mother, father and grandfather, brothers and sisters, has rendered an indecent number of architects and planners, painters and designers. For his part, Simon completed honours in furniture design at UTAS before creating furniture and interiors at the Designer Makers Coop in North Hobart. He went on to study environmental design in Launceston, graduated with a Bachelors in 2003, and subsequently was named program director of Furniture Design, part of UTAS’s School of Architecture & Design. 

He’s found time to undertake commission work and develop his own furniture range through Simon Ancher Studio, a workshop and display space in an old warehouse on St John Street, Launceston. The enterprise is run with his wife Lisa. 

Ancher gives a good deal of credit to Lisa’s business acumen and her determination. “You can’t do everything by yourself. You need a support network, a partner, collaborators. Or in my case, a wife.” The story of their relationship is compiled in the birthday, mothers’ day and cards he has hand-made for Lisa, now occupying an entire wall of their home.

Ancher has another primary tier of support, a former furniture design student named Matt Prince. “He came along at the right time,” continues Simon. “I’d been juggling university and private work, not always successfully. From the start, we had a lot of ideas in common in terms of design, drawing the best from what nature provides in tree form.” 

Over six years, they’ve dovetailed their individual talents on multiple projects, and it was Matt’s contacts in architecture that brought the introductions to the Parliament Square project. “We very quickly got a briefing from the architects on the kind of Tasmanian content they wanted for the job,” says Ancher.

“The commission was huge in every way possible: two eight-metre tables, another four of 5.5 metres and a series of smaller tables. It was certainly more work than one person could do. But between the two of us, we came around to the vision of the architects, and the clients, too.” 

Serendipity also lent a hand. Ancher had begun working with Hydrowood, the timbers now being drawn from flooded hydro dam storages like Lake Pieman. The first Tasmanian furniture designer to have access, Ancher had crafted in blackheart sassafras a ceremonial rod for the University of Tasmania to use at graduation ceremonies. “Like working with butter,” he says.

Confident in the Hydrowood source, Simon and Matt set up Southern Design Co in January 2016 to handle the Parliament Square job. But with an October deadline, the parameters of the job were tight, and even by winter, full specifications have not been produced. In the penultimate step, the tables will have to be broken into sections so they can be transported in a 2.7-metre freight lift.

Simon Ancher and Matt Prince will see these tables along their entire journey, from western lake to southern city, from under water to top-floor suite, from two-tonne log to four-millimetre finished timber. 

The seasoned hands and gaze of Ian Smith, an old-school sawmiller in Wynyard, will initially handle the timber Simon and Matt have selected at the lake. Smith’s family-owned Wynwood operation, the approved miller of Hydrowood, is one of the few that’s managed to withstand the encroachment of large operations that own swathes of Tasmanian forests.

Those logs -- blackwood, myrtle, celery top pine and leatherwood – are first milled to 8mm thicknesses. In their final rendering – after drying, natural shrinkage and sanding – they will reduce to half that size. The finished product will be laminated (glued and pressed together for strength) to the substrate, an ecologically sourced 30mm plywood.

“Ian is like me, excited by the potential this Hydrowood resource furnishes to furniture makers and to timber crafters,” says Simon Ancher. “There’s no ecological downside, and it’s a second chance for us, a way to use this material intelligently.” 

Ancher talks at length about sustainable use of his chosen material. “Let’s be honest,” he says, “in Tasmania, we haven’t been good about using our minor species intelligently. Yet there are good models in the Scandinavian countries for effective management of forests, not only their use of timber, but in replanting those same species they’ve cut.”

Ancher, who’s run his own business since 2009, left his UTAS job in late July 2016 to focus on the current commission and a growing list of private work. “I’ve loved the teaching, less the politics,” he says. “I don’t especially want to be an academic. I enjoy challenges, and you do need failure to learn. By that criterion, I’ve learned a hell of a lot!”

In July, the milled timber was trucked from Wynyard to Invermay, to a 20x9 metre space that Matt and Simon have set up for Southern Design Co as a separate entity from their own studios. There, on a series of lay-up tables, between a multiplicity of tools both industrial and hand, the Parliament Square tables are taking final shape. 

Each will be different, a design drawn not only from its makers’ eyes but suggested by the timber itself, its voice liberated after three decades out of sight. That design will invite from these sovereigns of the Tasmanian forest an exceptional beauty, a natural symmetry of colours and grains, their appeal to hand and eye first visualised on a wet winter’s day on Lake Pieman.

Simon frets a little about leaving the security of a university salary. “It will not be easy,” he says. “How are we going to pay the rent? And then I tell myself, with some real confidence: it’s a juggling act, like life.” 

And like cutting a log from an underwater forest.

Learn more about Simon Archer at simonancherstudio.com.au

Mike Kerr is a writer, journalist, cartoonist, radio producer and occasional comedian at www.theworldaccordingtokerr.com.au

This article was first published in Issue 82 of Forty South print magazine.