About Eclipse

Founded by Ross and Juli Triffitt, Eclipse Handcrafted Furniture have been manufacturing quality, solid timber furniture for well in excess of 30 years. For most of that time Eclipse have specialised in the use of unique indigenous hardwood timbers to handcraft unique pieces of furniture. The timbers used to create these pieces are mostly salvaged timber from dead trees on private properties or recycled timber from old buildings. These hardwood timbers reflect the harsh Australian environment that the tree has been exposed to,  in some cases easily for over two to three hundred years.

'We don't destroy Mother Nature's beautiful creation; we give it the gift of immortality'.

The timber in each Eclipse dining table has its own signature and story to tell.  We love the fact that many of the timbers used to make a dining table would otherwise have been wasted in some way.  The timber is salvaged from old dead trees or from old buildings and turned it into a treasured piece of furniture that will be around for literally generations. These beautiful and unique timbers are part of our natural heritage and they deserve to be preserved.
     
EXPERIENCE:
       
Ross and Juili have nearly forty years experience in the furniture industry. Ross started off in a small retail shop in Wagga in the late seventies selling lounge furniture made from basically large cushions filled with crumbed foam and covered in colourful velvets and corduroy materials. These 'lounges' and 'chairs' were then teamed with chrome coffee tables and arched lamps, a very obvious carry over from the sixties. As Ross explains, ' I used to love accessorising with interesting and novel items and one that comes to mind is 'frozen moments' that I'm sure some people around my age might remember'.  After a couple of years this little operation evolved into something a little more conventional in modern fabric and leather lounges amongst other things, made by a company in Sydney. This was around the time Juli came onto the scene and then a few later they started manufacturing timber furniture in their garage at home employing a young guy who had experience building furniture up in Qld. This is a very abbreviated version of a very long and interesting story about how the 'Eclipse' we now know started off quite a long time ago. 
Now days the team at Eclipse aim to provide customers with an individual and tailored service. Eclipse employs nine craftsmen at different levels of skill and experience in their Wagga Wagga based factory. Each craftsman is dedicated and passionate in the work they do and they strive to uphold the Eclipse ethos.
    
Exposing Nature's Secrets.
      
Ross's affinity with the beauty inherent in Australian Eucalypt Timbers started when he was growing up on a farm chopping up firewood. He observed the different colours, textures and densities within different types of eucalypts. Then his passion for Eucalypt timbers grew rapidly when his business started using some recycled hardwood to make furniture when they started to graduate from using softer timbers which back in the late eighties was mainly recycled Baltic and Hoop pine as well as old Oregon..  
One of Ross's other earlier influences came from his late Grandmother's hobby of lapidary (the art of polishing stones)
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'It was fascinating seeing a very ordinary looking stone go through the polishing process and being absolutely gob smacked when it came out. It was amazing to see the beautiful colours and patterns in what was once just an ordinary stone and this is very similar to what we do at Eclipse but with timber.
'The exterior of most of the naturally felled tree's we use is often seen as being drab and uninteresting but once the timber is dressed and polished up, an amazing arrays of colour and beautiful patterns appear'. Each piece of timber is unique just like the stones that his grandmother used to polish up. "We aim to expose this beauty, turning a once discarded dead tree into a practical functional and high value item that can be used and admired for generations."
                      
Eclipse Handcrafted Furniture's creations reveal the immense variations that are inherent in Australian hardwoods, many having lots of beautiful 'natural features' such as gum veins, sap pockets and many other very interesting things that makes the piece being created intrinsically individual.
Dining tables especially, become a fantastic showcase for these beautiful timbers and all their individual and unique characteristics. Finishing most dining tables the natural way with an oil obviously compliments the natural look in the wood.  In creating tables this way Ross recognises a connection with  the ancient Japanese concept of Wabi Sabi - the art of finding beauty in imperfection and profundity in nature. 
  
Eclipse designs are mostly underplayed and modest allowing the person browsing in the showroom to discover the undeclared beauty within each piece.  
Eclipse's main showroom is in the Alexandria area in Sydney.   Nikki, Aldo and Ross and Julies's son Marc run the Sydney showroom with Ross and Julie mostly running the factory in Wagga but are frequently in the showroom on weekends.