Western Port Woodworks

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Hastings, VIC
Western Port Woodworks

Bespoke cabinetry, architectural joinery & custom furniture — handcrafted in Hastings on the Mornington Peninsula. Registered Builder DB-L 100115.

westernportwoodworks.au

11/09/2026

The table that had to sit between two centuries.

This Mount Eliza home is a heritage building with modern wings, and the dining table sits in the newer half. It had to belong there without disowning the older rooms it looks back towards.

A trestle was the answer. It's one of the oldest table forms there is and it has never really gone out of fashion, which is another way of saying it doesn't announce a period. Understated, on purpose. The interest is in the timber and the joinery rather than the silhouette.

Silver wattle, the same timber running through the living room and the study, with a silver ash wedge locking the stretcher through each upright. No glue in the frame. It comes apart if it ever needs to.

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04/09/2026

The joint that holds the table together is the one you can see.

A wedged through-tenon. The stretcher passes right through the upright and a tapered wedge is driven in behind it, pulling the joint tight. No glue, no screws, no fixings. Tap the wedge out and the table comes apart into pieces that fit through a doorway.

The middle frames are bases dry-fitted on the workshop floor, standing on their own before a top goes near them. If the frame isn't square and solid at that stage, nothing afterwards will fix it.

It's a Japanese idea — structure meant to be seen rather than concealed — and I keep returning to it. Partly because it's honest. Mostly because a table that comes apart can be moved, and moved again, and tightened once more in fifty years when the timber has settled.

The wedge is always cut from a contrasting species, so the joint reads as a deliberate mark rather than a repair. English oak with red mahogany. Silver wattle with silver ash. Red ironbark with white oak. Messmate with blackwood.

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01/09/2026

The old half of the house needed a different answer.

This study sits in the heritage section of a Mount Eliza home whose modern wings we'd already fitted out. A handleless, minimal treatment would have been wrong here — the room has period bones and deserves to be answered on its own terms.

So the piece speaks both languages at once. The overhead cabinets are solid silver wattle, rail-and-stile doors with raised panels, made the way they'd have been made when the house was built. The drawer fronts below are veneer, grain-matched vertically so the figure runs continuously down each bank. Traditional construction and modern surface, in the same room, in the same timber that runs through the rest of the house.

That's the part of this trade worth defending. A joiner who only works in one idiom will make every house look like their last one. The house should decide.

Built with .

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28/08/2026

A timber you've probably never been offered.

Silver wattle is a Victorian native and a cousin of Blackwood — softer in figure, honey-toned, and beautiful. It is also rarely milled, which is why you seldom see it in cabinetry.

The designer on this project spotted a piece of it in our office and asked for it by name. Saying yes meant tracking down enough solid stock and enough veneer to run through an entire house — living room, dining table and study — with nothing left to chance. It took some hunting, but the result is a home where every room speaks the same language.

The coffee table in front of it is Blackwood from the Dandenong Ranges. Two wattles, one room, and a generation of growth between them.

That's the advantage of a bespoke maker over a supplier catalogue: if the right timber exists, we'll go and find it.

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22/08/2026

Built into a wall that wasn't there.

This Mount Eliza home is a heritage building with modern wings, newly bought and waiting to be brought together. The brief was joinery throughout, running one common theme from the old rooms into the new.

The living room began as an empty wall cavity. Working alongside the builder, we opened the space out, set in a gas fireplace, and fitted a full-width unit in silver wattle. The drawer fronts are book-matched veneer, laid out so the figure mirrors across each pair, and the bench top is veneered to match with a solid front edge — the detail that lets a veneered surface wear like a solid one. Sharknose finger pulls throughout, floating shelves either side, and a clear two-pack finish built for family life.

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18/08/2026

The second kitchen behind the kitchen.

A butler's pantry with its own sink, dishwasher and coffee station, floating shelves in solid American White Oak, and a wall of full-height storage. When guests arrive, the cavity slider closes and the main kitchen stays immaculate.

Same materials, same standard of finish — because the rooms only you see deserve the same care as the ones everyone does.

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11/08/2026

Some of our favourite work is the kind you almost don't notice.

This American oak wall runs floor to ceiling, fridge included, with the grain sequenced across every door so the eye reads it as one surface. No visual break, no giveaway that there's an appliance in there at all.

Quiet details like this are where bespoke earns its name.

04/08/2026

A complete kitchen, crafted and installed by our workshop.

Every cabinet in this Moorooduc home was crafted in American oak veneer, finished in hardwax oil and paired with a porcelain benchtop. No handles, no hardware — just clean lines, integrated finger pulls and timber selected so the grain flows across every door and drawer front.

Through the cavity slider sits a full butler's pantry with its own sink and dishwasher — the hardworking half of a kitchen made for a busy household.

Designed, made and installed by Western Port Woodworks.

Address

1/24 Kanowna Street
Hastings, VIC

Website

http://www.westernportwoodworks.au/

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