About Jonathan Francis Jonathan Francis made his first wooden item (a box) at sixteen, but it was at nineteen in a friend's workshop in Massachusetts that his interest in wood really developed. He spent the next five years learning about furniture making before returning to England to set up his own workshop, which was initially a room in a London flat. Around that time John Brown's book Welsh Stick Chairs was published, and thus began a love of chairmaking, and especially the stick chair's successor the Windsor chair. Eventually the living room workshop became a proper workshop, and there the Windsor chair making began in earnest, along with many other types of furniture.