David Linley

“My dining room table is just a huge, great thick slab of oak on a beautiful frame. Whenever people come to supper I invite them to carve their name in it.”

“We are a modern family who need to live in a certain way.”

“Beeswax is always preferable to chemical polishes because it does not destroy the natural surface of wood.”

“I love Burgundy but my favourite is a Bordeaux - Chateau Leoville-Barton.”

“Usually, when people think of marquetry, they think of Dutch 17th-century furniture with inlaid flowers and jugs. Our goal is to break down the barriers between old and new, to combine traditional marquetry techniques with a modern idiom.”

“In an ideal world, you would have his-and-hers bathrooms and his-and-hers dressing rooms, complete with a single bed where the Mrs. need not be woken up when there's a 7 o'clock flight to catch.”

“Horse Guards is my favourite building in London.”

“I remember my father making many things. Once we made a shed, and a man in the village came along to help. After a couple of glasses of beer, he said, 'Give me a tape measure and I'll make it by eye,' and the result was so beautiful.”

“London is a series of villages, really. I like that.”

“I really do build furniture to be used, you see, to be lived with.”

“There is something reassuring about British-made products and their inventiveness and ingenuity, their creative spirit and eccentricity and their British wit and charm.”

“You can never split yourself from the family you were born into.”

“My design teachers were teaching us how to mass-manufacture; how to create something, but it's not lasting - it's always about the next trend, it's the next thing.”

“People are fed up with mass production.”

“Pepys was such a meticulous person that he had little wooden blocks to make all the books on his shelves the same height.”

“I'm extremely proud of my relations and my heritage and my family. That's one side of my life, and my work is the other side of my life, and... I've always tried to keep them, you know apart.”

“It's far nicer to congregate around a card table than a television. It takes me back to my childhood, when we'd play family card games like Racing Demon.”

“Wood is very warm and sensual and meant to be touched.”

“I'm a maker, not a designer.”

“I make dreams become reality. I think of things that never were and say, 'Why?'”