Some things are too valuable, too fragile or too awkward for a cardboard box. They need a crate built around them. We have been designing and building bespoke timber crates in Cork since 1978 — for sculpture, paintings, antiques, instruments and machinery travelling by road, sea or air.
A crate is only as good as the fit. These are pieces we have measured, built for, packed and shipped.
Paintings, framed works, bronzes and installations moving between galleries, auction houses, collections and private homes. Flat crates for framed work, braced crates with foam cradles for three-dimensional pieces.
Pianos, clocks, mirrors, glass cabinets and inherited furniture. Export-wrapped first, then crated, so nothing touches bare timber on the journey.
Lab instruments, server racks, prototypes, exhibition stands and production equipment — anything where the replacement cost or the lead time makes a purpose-built crate the cheap option.
Artwork rarely fails in transit because of the distance. It fails at the handling points — the loading, the lifting, the moment it is set down. Our approach is to remove those risks before the vehicle moves: the piece is wrapped and cradled so it cannot shift inside the crate, the crate is built so it can be carried and lifted by its own structure, and it is marked so that whoever handles it next knows which way is up and how fragile it is.
We collect from studios, galleries, auction rooms and private addresses across Ireland, and we ship internationally by road, sea and air freight. Where a piece is going into the hold of an aircraft, the crate is built to the airline’s specification and documented accordingly — we have done exactly this for individual oil paintings travelling as checked cargo.
Every crate starts from the item’s real dimensions, not a nearest-fit stock size. That matters in two directions: too tight and the piece is under pressure, too loose and it moves. We measure, allow for the packing material that goes around the piece, and build the case to those figures.
The timber is heat-treated to ISPM-15, the international standard for wood packaging crossing borders. That is not a detail worth skipping — untreated timber can be refused at the port, and a shipment held in customs costs far more than the crate did. Heavier pieces get a skidded base so a forklift or pallet truck can take the weight, and anything travelling by sea gets a moisture barrier inside.
Tell us what you are shipping, roughly how big it is and where it is going. We will come back with a price for the crate, the packing and the transport.
If the job is smaller than a crate, we sell the same materials we use ourselves — bubble wrap, moving blankets and packing paper, and double-walled boxes — from the shop, with collection from Ovens or delivery nationwide.
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