South Island sawmiller
The smell of marcocarpa and scream of saws greets visitors to a family-run sawmill up a valley behind Motueka where Lloyd Knowles specialises in making one-off timber products, often with intricate profiles, for do-it-yourself builders, renovators and furniture-makers.
“We make a whole range of stuff from weatherboards to architraves, as well as replica mouldings using different profiles. We just make a pattern to fit whatever they want. Negative detail is the flash term,” says Lloyd, who runs the business with his wife, Diane. Most requests for bespoke work come from Golden Bay and Motueka.