Two days in Squamish with the Halden bench.

The Halden table is built in a converted stables outside Squamish by a workshop of four. On the Saturday we arrived, they were cutting the through-tenons for a dining table ordered in November.

There is no drawing on the wall. The tolerances are in the joiner's hands. We watched a mortise get checked with a thumbnail and a clean square — and fitted, on the fifth pass, within maybe a hundredth of a millimetre.

The reason we carry this table is not that it is unbreakable. It is that if it ever did break — which, given the joinery, would require an event — it could be repaired at the same bench, in the same way, by somebody working with the same tools. That is not a small thing.