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Page 24 · Section Workshop & Wood

Work­shop & wood

A barn, a hall, a timber shed – and fifty-five years of knowing which board is good for what.

Thielen

The workshop

Fifty-five years in Herrstein

Herrstein is a half-timbered village with a clock-tower lane, a castle and, since 1971, a carpentry workshop. Alois Thielen started out with a second-hand planer and a loan of 8,000 Deutschmarks. The first years were windows and doors for houses in the village – many of them are still in place.

Walk into the hall today and the first thing you see is the timber shed: around forty cubic metres of oak, beech, ash, larch, cherry and walnut, stacked and labelled with dates. Some of it has been there for over ten years. We buy almost all our wood from a sawmill near Morbach that processes logs from the Hunsrück. Short distances, known trees.

Inside the hall there are modern machines – a panel saw, a CNC router for stair strings, an extraction system that blows the shavings straight into the heating. And next to them, three workbenches where we still work by hand: dovetails, scribed fillers, the last tenth of a millimetre.

We have stayed small on purpose. Four people means the person who measures your room also builds and fits the piece. Nothing is handed to subcontractors, and you have the same phone number from start to finish.

1971–2026

Timeline

  1. 1971

    Alois Thielen opens his workshop in his parents’ barn in Herrstein. First job: twelve windows for the rectory.

  2. 1988

    A new workshop hall at the edge of the village, clad in larch from the Idarwald forest. The façade is silver grey today.

  3. 2009

    After three journeyman years – partly in Nova Scotia, Canada – Katrin Thielen passes her master’s exam in Koblenz.

  4. 2014

    Katrin takes over the workshop. Alois still comes in every Wednesday to sharpen the tools.

  5. 2021

    Solar roof, new dust extraction, heating fuelled by our own shavings. We haven’t bought heating oil for the hall since.

  6. 2026

    Four people, one apprenticeship, around 40 m³ of timber in the shed.

You don’t notice a good drawer. You only notice a bad one.

— Alois Thielen

The team

There are four of us

Eight woods we work with

Wood guide

Wood keeps living, even in finished furniture: it takes up moisture, releases it and changes colour in the light. Some woods darken a lot – walnut even gets lighter. Use the switch to see roughly how an oiled board looks after two years in a living room.

Brinell hardness: guide values across the grain, varying with growth. Higher means fewer dents.

For oiled surfaces

Care in three sentences

  1. Wipe with a damp cloth, not a wet one – and avoid microfibre, it is abrasive.
  2. Re-oil thinly once a year; we do the first re-oiling after twelve months for free.
  3. Water rings and scratches can always be repaired on oil – that is its big advantage over lacquer.

Enquiry · Page 34

Come and visit the workshop

On Saturdays from 10 am to 1 pm we show you the hall, the timber shed and sample boards – by appointment.

Start an enquiry +49 6785 000000

Thielen · No. 56 · Autumn 2026Page 24

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