The Guild
The Melbourne Guild of Fine Woodworking (The Guild) was founded by Alastair Boell in 2007. After graduating from the world renowned North Bennet Street School, Boston, USA, Alastair felt that there was a great need in Australia for an educational facility that focuses on traditional skills.
The Guild is conveniently located in Blackburn and provides 3 different course formats:
Our Open Courses offer ongoing morning, afternoon & evening woodworking classes for students of any level to undertake a project of their own desire.
Our Weekly Project Base Courses are geared towards Beginners or anyone interested in a more structure class where everyone works on the same project once a week and where the start and finish dates are set.
Our Intensive Project Based Courses are for those who would like to immerse themselves in a project and have it completed in the shortest possible time. These courses range from a 1 day course to an 8 day course.
Our student teacher ratios are very low which enables each student to get some one on one instruction time from our highly qualified instructors.
Our facilities include a fully equipped machine room, 4 classrooms with workbenches, numerous hand tools, hardware, finishing products and a variety of exotic salvaged timbers. We also offer onsite milling with our own mill and an in-house workshop milling service. For those interested in ‘Commission’ work, we have a gifted community of furniture designers/makers on call.
The Guild is committed to preserving and advancing craft traditions in furniture making. We are also committed to promoting a greater awareness and appreciation of craftsmanship. In our classes we emphasise the skilful use of hand tools and power equipment and an informed use of appropriate materials and proportions.
We are passionate about what we do and want to share information, ideas and skills with our extended woodworking community.
We promise to do our very best to provide you with endless opportunities in a stimulating and supportive community. We invite you to take your place at the Melbourne Guild of Fine Woodworking!
“Hand skills are integral to our development mentally as well as physically. The relevancy of hand-skills training has come into question. What we have now is the perception that high-tech training programs are relevant and responsive to the needs of society and not manual skills training. We are of the opinion that manual arts training and hand skills are relevant to conceptual skills. The value of manual skills training to both the individual and society is now becoming more apparent. As we become disillusioned, perhaps, with the technological improvements, and we see that we are more and more disconnected from the way things are made and the processes, we are more able to understand the loss of culture and the knowledge that is imbedded in hand made things, then the value in hand-skills training is more and more apparent.”
Having spent many an hour dreaming of making my own furniture, I was finally able to make it a reality having recently attended the three day Perch Stool workshop with Jon, Alastair and his team. What an amazing three days! Although the course was intensive, the atmosphere was always relaxed, with Jon, Alastair and Doug, ever ready to help and guide us through the various, and often complex stages of the Perch Stool. I found all three of the guys to be extremely generous, who were never shy in being prepared to share their in-depth knowledge and skills, which more often than not, was delivered with an abundance of good humor and musings.