WILLIAM Morris, the great late nineteenth century design guru, advised us never to have anything in our homes that we did not find beautiful or useful.

Peter Cummings is determined to offer both qualities in one item from his studio in the heart of Swaledale.

On entering his showroom-cum-workshop at the Dales Centre business park in Reeth, it is difficult to decide whether his work is sculpture or furniture. He is the first to admit his items are not cheap and their promotion through art galleries and glossy design magazines suggests the former, but the chairs and stools are practical, sturdy and, above all, comfortable.

On learning that he gave up a high-flying, well-paid job in computer systems design to open his studio, most would imagine it was a hobby which turned into a career following years of longing and planning. But Mr Cummings admits that, while he had always been deeply interested in design, the furniture idea was born "in the blink of an eye".

Frustrated by pressure of work and too much time away from his wife and three children, he desperately wanted to step off the "treadmill" but had no idea what to do to earn a living.

A house move and the need for more furniture prompted him to make a bookcase after seeing expensive items in a pine store.

"I had always been keen on art and design but never really done anything about it," he says. "I visited a place where people made furniture from a pattern book and I thought I could do that. I got some wood, did a little drawing, bought some screws, a plane and a hacksaw and made this bookcase. It cost me 100 quid - about a sixth of the price of the one we saw in the shop.

"My wife, Amanda, said 'This is it, this is the thing you want to do'. She saw it before I did."

Mr Cummings, from Darlington, was steered into engineering at the age of 16 by careers advisers at Eastbourne Comprehensive School.

"I had this nebulous notion about being involved in art but I was reasonably good academically and good at practical stuff so engineering was a reasonable choice for someone in an industrial town in the North-East."

He worked at Cummins in Darlington and, following a 12-month apprenticeship in the workshops, began the traditional tour of the company, working in different departments.

By chance, he was in the IT unit when redundancies were announced in 1983 and he had the choice of staying on or joining the dole queue.

"I stayed and the rest went," he recalls. "IT was very much in its infancy and I found it interesting."

He married in 1987 and, two years later, accepted a job in Edinburgh and the couple moved to Dunbar.

"It was a very easy lifestyle - a nice house, nice car, foreign holidays - but the work was just dull. I wanted to do something else but I didn't know what and I had responsibilities."

Mr Cummings opted to go freelance - "I doubled my income by walking 400 yards down the street" - and entered the world of fixed contracts, high pressure and constant travelling.

By this time, the couple's eldest daughter was born and the family moved to Masham, although Mr Cummings spent most of his time working away from home. The freelance bubble burst and in 1996 he accepted a job with an IT company in Darlington.

"I worked on the biggest computer system in Europe, which handled millions of pieces of information about daily revenue from rail ticket sales," he says. "I designed and built the system, which handled 15 million records a day.

"Again, we had a nice house, posh car, holidays, happy kids, food on the table, but I was spending 40 hours a week doing something I really didn't want to do. My heart just wasn't in it."

By 1998, he was ready to pack the whole thing in, buy a caravan and take off, but family responsibilities stayed his hand.

"I'm not particularly religious but I just got this feeling that God would intervene and send something into my life and show me the way," he recalls.

Then came the bookcase episode, which led to him buying a selection of woodworking books.

"I didn't know what I was doing but it just lit this enormous fire in me and I just had to know how to do it properly; I couldn't live not being able to do this the right way."

An internet search brought up the name of cabinet maker Wyn Bishop, at East Witton, near Leyburn, who ran courses at Aysgarth School workshops.

"I enrolled for a course and spent five days with one-to-one tuition," says Mr Cummings, who now lives at Manfield, near Darlington. "It ended with a project to make a drawer in a carcase and Wyn said I had the ability and flair to use the tools well.

"That really lit the spark, but I had no premises, no tools, no timber and no designs."

He bought second-hand tools and some oak and beavered away in his parents' garage in his spare time.

"I spent about six months trying to design something. I wanted to make something in striking, bold, big pieces of wood, something really jaw-dropping, something no-one had ever come across before."

He had begun researching contemporary furniture making and eventually produced a chair, which now stands in his Reeth studio.

"Once I had the design, I took a couple of weeks off work to make it in my parents' garage. I was finishing applying the oil to the chair on the kitchen table - much to my wife's annoyance - when another chair design appeared in my mind's eye in its finished form. I grabbed a piece of scrap paper and drew it in 3D and pinned it on the kitchen noteboard. I couldn't believe it, it was just there, ball-shaped and with outwardly bowed legs.

"It was as if I had laboured for six months to take the lid off something and it just went whoosh. Now every time I sit down at the kitchen table to read a newspaper, I pick up a pencil and something appears in the margin."

The seemingly divine intervention boosted his confidence and, after securing the unit at Reeth, where the family had holidayed, he quit his job in February this year and opened his studio in May.

"The fear had gone, the social stigma thing had gone. I don't know what we are going to earn, I have four people and a dog dependent on me, I have bills to pay. We will move to a smaller house and it will be a complete shift in lifestyle, but I have never felt happier or more fulfilled."

His work has already caught the eye of customers. The Reeth community orchard has ordered two seats and a bench and he has begin approaching galleries which he hopes will showcase his work. He also hopes that up-market design and interiors magazines will feature his creations.

"I want my work to appeal to people who really appreciate design, the same sort of people who will spent £1,000 on a painting because they see it and simply have to have it.

"All my teenage years I believed I could make something by copying - I used to copy famous paintings - but I never realised I could make something completely original."

* Cummings' Original Furniture is at Unit 7, Reeth Dales Centre, Silver Street, Reeth, tel 01748 884660. There is a web site, www.petercummings.co.uk.