You could think that words like "bespoke" and "affordable" dont belong in the same sentence when you are talking about buying furniture, in particular high quality furniture such as solid oak but you would be very wrong. Ofcourse different people have very different opinions of what is to be regarded as affordable, and to be honest you are never going to get a truly high quality piece of furniture for the same price that you can pick up a mass produced flat pack item for, but then again, when you look at the fact that a well crafted oak furniture which has been manufactured from the finest available oak and joined using traditional time honoured methods instead of a little sachet of glue and a bag of panel pins, its easy to comprehend that it is going to last for potentially hundreds of years and become a family heirloom which your children can pass on to their children, and their childrens children. It starts to make sense that buying furniture of this kind is really a wise move. Additionally, if you have kids the chances are that you will need furniture that is long-lasting and capable of standing up to anything they can throw at it.
There are still several high quality joiners in the uk that specialise in making this type of furniture, the best of them take a very traditional approach and use the best techniques to join the furniture together such as dovetail joints or mortise and tenon joints. Confirming the sort of joinery methods used during the manufacture of their items is maybe the best way of deciding if the furniture you are looking at is of the highest quality. This is because if they have used proper joinery methods, it signifies that real time and quality workmanship has been invested into the piece instead of just screwing the item together or using biscuit joints (faster but a very bad substitute).
You should also enquire about how they obtain their oak, and whether they use a "trusted supplier" or whether they go where the very best quality oak is available at the time. This is a very good question to ask as the real fact of the matter is that no country constantly produces the best quality oak. The very best oak timber is obtained from a combination of stable climatatic conditions and good drainage, therefore whereas one year British Oak could be the very best available, the next year American Oak could have taken its place as the best on the market at that time. A really good furniture maker would know this , and if he is using time honoured joinery techniques and going to the trouble to make sure that the oak he uses is of the highest possible quality by changing suppliers accordingly, you can be sure that he is a real artisan furniture maker, and therefore the furniture you buy should be good for hundreds and hundreds of years.