Meet the former cabinet-maker who crafts the wood in a Morgan

Quick game of car company word association? BMW: grilles. Jaecoo: Poundland. Morgan: wood. Whether you’re as old as the nearby Malvern Hills or not yet tall enough to see over those running board front wings, chances are you know Morgan as the staunchly traditional British sports cars made out of wood.

OK, not entirely. Morgan switched to a bonded aluminium chassis under the venerable Plus Four six years ago, but even in the new £102k Supersport, the sweeping bodywork is supported by a crafted ash frame. On the workbenches, Morgan still employs enormous wooden panel formers, looking like railway sleepers from a Salvador Dali painting, to create those trademark flowing curves.

But you only see said timber if you’re visiting Morgan’s 112 year old factory down Pickersleigh Road. How to bring that classic Morgan association with this lightweight, sustainable, versatile miracle material out into the open, to be cherished, admired, and celebrated? That’s where David Young’s your guy.

Photography: Tom Barnes

“My job title? Erm, I don’t really have one. I’m just a woodworker.” He’s humbly showing me round his ‘office’ – a fragrant corner of the wood shop in one of Morgan’s charming redbrick outbuildings. David could rightfully claim to be ‘head craftsman’ or ‘wood whisperer in chief’, but he’s happy to be ‘just a woodworker’.

He didn’t learn his trade at Morgan. “I’m a cabinet maker,” he explains. “From the age of 16, I worked for a company just over the hill making high end furniture. I worked there for 26 years, and learned a lot, then I had an opportunity come up in Wrexham. Another company prised me away. Sadly I was only there about six months before my mother got ill and I thought, ‘well you only get one mum, don’t you?’ so I thought I’d better find something nearer home.”

As he speaks, he leafs through a drawer showing me pictures of his portfolio. “This is called a Vortex cabinet. I did one of these for the Queen’s nephew, David Linley. You can still get them now through Linley – about £110,000. It’s artwork, really.” David ruefully admits he doesn’t know how many hours went into its manufacture.

Was being a whizz with wood and a god of grain in the blood? “At school I knew I wanted to do engineering or woodwork. I was quite good with my hands. Unfortunately my dad died when I was 16, and I left school, hadn’t got a job and my mum was like ‘you need to sort yourself out’. So I phoned around all the local woodworking places, and there were no jobs as such, so I phoned up Alan Elridge [local bespoke furniture maker] and he was doing a big job for Unilever: a five-metre boardroom table and 16 chairs.

"At the time it was only a two-man business and one of them had come off his motorbike and couldn’t work. He took me on for an apprenticeship, I got taxis to work for two years... and stayed there for 26.”

I ask David if it was ever an ambition to transition into the car scene. Again, there’s a poignant family connection. “My brother’s worked here for nine years, and my dad always wanted me to work here. It was always known as a good place to work in Malvern.”

David’s day-to-day now involves scouring the database of new car orders, noting the chosen trim materials and finishes, then preparing the raw materials and overseeing his apprentices. On the Plus Four alone, there are 14 centre console finishes available, including 11 different woods. You can have aluminium strakes inlaid like pinstripes, or a complex marquetry sideboard. These are the finished surfaces, but underneath it’s a lasagne-like sandwich of ply and adhesive, exactingly formed to the correct shape.

But his experience from few-off designer label furniture has made David push Morgan into new realms of individualisation – the sort of woodworking you might expect from a coachbuilding division at Rolls or Pagani.

“One of my first big projects here was woodwork for the Spiaggina [derived from Italian for beach – think Morgan beach buggy] which was for the owner of the company, Andrea,” [Bonomi, founder of Morgan’s majority shareholder Investindustrial]. The car was a dramatic one-off open-top special with a giant teak arch and polished yacht-like decking. “That was tricky knowing who it was for and getting it to the stage I’d be happy with it, plus there were no drawings to go off. That was a nice piece to do, and then I’ve been involved with Midsummer.”

Again partial to an understatement, David’s most recent ‘involvement’ is a shrine to his craft. The Midsummer is an exclusive run of wood-topped barchettas created in partnership with Italian design royalty Pininfarina. All 50 sold out before the car was revealed in May 2025. After it went public, the waiting list was twice oversubscribed. Its signature feature? Eighty three square metres of teak just 0.6mm thick, painstakingly layered and laminated over some 30 hours per car.

"I worked 65 days straight on Midsummer with no weekends,” David admits. “I normally get here at about five in the morning. My wife’s been on at me, saying I’m working too much.

Hopefully Mrs Young is in a forgiving mood, because David reckons Midsummer shows the way forward. “I need to get away from the regular production stuff. Sam, my apprentice, can do that by himself now. I’ll be involved with more special projects – but not next week,” he grins. “I’ve got a week off.”