When Cuisine contributor Claire McCall recently bought some kitset planter boxes from Good Wood Products she was pretty pleased with them. So we dug a bit deeper and found a great ‘born from necessity’ story. Well, you see, it all began with a desk. As New Zealand entered Level-4 lockdown in March 2020, Callum Macdonald’s flatmate Katie needed a desk, so he designed one, drew it one day, built it the next and Katie had a super-stylish desk to work from. He slapped a snap on Instagram and word got around of this simple, sturdy, click-together design made of natural radiata pine plywood. Best of all, it is easy to assemble with no fiddly screws or allen keys, just a few taps with the plywood hammer supplied.

Thinking, “What would make lockdown easier?”, laptop and tablet stands and lap desks for his mates came next, and now the range spans several models of desk, a trestle table, stool, pegboards, lawn games and the kitset planter boxes (made from marine-grade plywood), which make good sandpits, too. Then Callum’s girlfriend was pestering for a new bed. “I kept saying ‘I’ll get onto it, I’ll get onto it, so in the end I got onto it.” So check out the kitset beds – which can, it is claimed, be assembled by one person in less than 10 minutes – together with cute bedside storage cabinets. The high-grade plywood is extremely strong and comes from sustainable sources as it is plantation- grown. And as an 87-year-old woman  recently called Callum to say she’d had no trouble assembling her planter, we see no excuses now not to get that vege garden started. goodwood.nz