Millimetre
Millimetre is an award-winning design and fabrication company, established in 2006 and comprising 30 dedicated staff including designers, architects, joiners, and fabricators. Working across bespoke architecture, public art and high-end furniture, their team combines technical design expertise with specialist craft skills — using CNC milling, precision engineering, and hand finishing to produce complex forms that sit at the intersection of art and manufacturing.
In 2019, Millimetre invested in a KUKA based robotic milling system built by CNC Robotics — a strategic addition to their production capability that gave them the scale and flexibility to take on work that their existing setup couldn't deliver. The decision was brought into focus by their appointment to develop, fabricate, and install Kara Walker's Fons Americanus — a 13.5-metre working fountain installed in the Turbine Hall at Tate Modern from October 2019 to April 2020. The system milled and shaped the topographical cork that formed the fountain's surface continuously throughout the project, with Millimetre developing several novel techniques in the process.
The KUKA Quantec system works with solid carbide cutters from 3mm up to 40mm diameter and 500mm in length, alongside rasps, burrs, and sanding drums — giving Millimetre the flexibility to move between roughing and detailed surface work within the same setup. Accuracy sits at ±1mm, sufficient for the sculptural and architectural applications the studio works across. Programming is handled through Powermill, Autodesk, with design and modelling carried out in Rhino, Grasshopper, Solidworks and Freeform+.
The system has since become a core part of Millimetre's production workflow across a wide range of projects. It has been used to produce large-scale sculptural public furniture, shaped components for high-end hardwood furniture, complex jigs for assembly and metal bending, formers for lamination and steam bending, and two-sided casting patterns in solid wood for aluminium, bronze, and iron — across materials ranging from cork and modified timbers through to English oak.
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