Pushing boundaries - winning customers

Richard Langston, his business partner Kieran Nelhams and their team of craftsmen have made a name for themselves designing and making kitchens and dressing rooms for the well-heeled and they've become especially well known among the cognoscenti of the interior design world for creating unusual designs that often involve seemingly impossible angles most cabinet-makers would shy away from.

'We started using Lamello in the summer of 2020,' Richard tells us. 'I'd seen Lamello's Zeta P2 Cordless being used on Instagram and I was intrigued. We've always worked with angles but when we saw how Clamex fittings worked, bisecting the angles, it was a real eye-opener. We realised we could design highly complex pieces from our CAD program and then put everything together in the workshop like a jigsaw puzzle without glue, disassemble it, then reassemble it on site just as quickly without damaging anything. For us it was a game-changer: exactly what we had been looking for.'

Richard called Lamello's Shaye Chatfield for a demonstration. 'Instantly I was sold,' he recalls. 'I could see the benefit immediately. I could imagine things we would be able to make, ways we could work. If we replaced the fixings we were using with Clamex for our cabinets and utilised the clamping pressure of Tenso fixings to attach all our fillers we would be able to dry-fit in the workshop without having to use masking tape to hold joints together. And we could make more complex joints easily. 'Having such innovative fixings means we can be equally innovative in the furniture we design and make. We have been able to push boundaries in terms of what we manufacture and that's propelled our client list. Having that self-clamping pressure has meant we have been able to incorporate some really intricate bisected compound angles into our designs - things we would never have thought to design, or even tried to approach before.

Since starting to work with Lamello, Richard has been a keen advocate of the Zeta P2 hand-held biscuit joiner. He had the opportunity to try the Zeta P2 Cordless during a Lamello Influencer Day before it was officially launched in September 2022. 'It's well balanced, lighter in weight and sits comfortably in the hand,' he says, clearly thrilled with the new addition to his workshop. 'Being portable, it's great for making fine adjustments. If you have a really intricately-angled shelving unit, for example, and you can only see the exact position of the shelf when the cabinet is in place, that's where the cordless really comes into its own. Because you can rotate the battery - something you can't do on the corded version - if the cabinet diminishes to a point you can get a lot tighter into the angle.' The Zeta P2 has its permanent place in the workshop environment and on the construction site. 'The corded machine got the constant power you need at a bench. If you are going to mass-repeat cuts, you may as well use the corded version but for anyone who works on site, the Zeta P2 Cordless is a real breath of fresh air.'

Richard is convinced that investing in Lamello connectors and equipment pays off. 'You're not talking massive sums of money per project but what Lamello does is it streamlines your efficiency. You save time in assembly. All the marking out and lining up is taken away. All your fillers are perfectly straight with no glue-ups. If you need to adapt things, there is flexibility beyond anything glue and clamps can offer. There's a massive time-saving on site!'

Every workbench in Richard's workshop is equipped with a range of fixings and a Zeta P2 and each of the craftsmen has developed his own way of working: 'Before we started working with Lamello, we had a demonstration from Shaye, Lamello's sales representative. He gave us some pointers but there is no set way of working. There are different combinations and you work with what suits you. It still baffles me how one machine can change a whole cabinet shop but it has - and now Lamello has brought out a new cordless version, I can see that having a similar effect when we are working on site.' He further states: 'We believe in Lamello products so much that we've aligned our whole business to them,' Richard concludes. 'We couldn't produce this standard of work without Lamello. It's for people who want to take their joinery to the next level.'