“It's a people business,” said Martin in 1992. Thirty years on, little about that has changed.

Martin took an apprenticeship with a bespoke cabinetmaker at sixteen. In 1982 he moved into kitchens, spending eleven years at Cambridge-based Kitchen Consultants, where he became a designer and met Tony. A decade later the two went into business together. The name — obvious in hindsight — came from Martin’s father-in-law.

“We were in a very strong position when we started out,” Martin says. “Tony doing the fitting, me having experience from both sides.” Tony had spent fifteen years at Kitchen Consultants and had dealt with every single customer personally. Nothing was ever too much trouble for him.

In their first year they sold almost double what they had forecast. A year later they won their first award.

“One of our first customers remembered us from Kitchen Consultants,” Martin recalls. “Last year they came back and asked us to modify it a bit. I saw the kitchen we’d fitted in ’93 and it was still perfect. New worktops, retiled, and it looked brilliant again.” It is the standard we still design to.

When Bar Hill began redevelopment, we took the chance to move to much larger premises in the centre of Histon, with room for far more working displays, and the showroom we still occupy today.

Tony passed away in 2003. His care and consideration remain the keystones of how the company works.

Dan Smith joined the family business, taking on day-to-day management and financial strategy. The third Smith, and the second generation, in a company the family has run since 1992.

Alex Baldwin joined in the September, aged twenty-two and straight out of an interior design degree at Kingston. Clare Chapman followed a month later, having read geography at Hull and worked in coastal research in Cambridge before retraining in design. Both started at the old Bar Hill showroom, and both are still here.

Between them they have designed hundreds of kitchens from this building. The measure of that is not the number: it is the clients who come back years later and ask for them by name. Clare now runs the showroom as well as designing in it.

Martin and Debra Smith retired, thirty-four years after Martin and Tony started the company. Dan now runs it. Martin may still turn up at a finished kitchen with a camera.

Over half of our new business now comes from people who were recommended to us. Each project stays with the designer who designed it, from first sketch to final photos. That continuity is the simplest explanation for why the experience is a calm one.