Workshop Stories

Seis piezas de haya, diez tornillos y dos tuercas. Con eso Michael Thonet fabricó la primera silla en serie del mundo, y unos cincuenta millones salieron de sus fábricas antes...

A Louis XVI cylinder desk, found at the back of a warehouse in the south of France. Everything that happens from the moment I pull out the drawer and turn...

In 1804, a punch card loom increased the output of Lyon weavers thirtyfold. Two hundred years later, silk is still woven by hand there, and those punch cards were the...

The craft is called cabinetmaking due to ebony, a wood that almost no Spanish furniture has ever featured. And which, as early as the 17th century, was imitated by staining...

A client sent us a photo of her dresser with a white ring and an apology. She had been "caring" for it for two years with a supermarket polishing spray....

A 19th-century walnut sideboard fit well in the living room and was left on the landing. No one had measured the doorway. When an antique piece of furniture doesn't fit...

Eleven holes in the side of an inherited dresser and two months of not daring to bring it into the house. Woodworm is scarier than it deserves to be in...

A client wrote to us, upset: she had bought a 19th-century chest of drawers and it "looked odd" in her living room. The chest of drawers was perfect. The problem...

A customer lost an entire Saturday scouring Madrid for an antique chest of drawers. They came back without one—and found it that night from the sofa. This is the honest...

"But the nightstand isn't worth that." What it's worth isn't the furniture: it's the hours of a trade that has almost disappeared. We publish what almost no one publishes: what...

A client wanted to strip her grandmother's walnut dresser to lighten the wood, like on Pinterest. We told her no. Stripped wood is trendy and we love it, but there...

Some "antique" furniture is younger than your washing machine. In our workshop, we don't need certificates to know this; we just turn over a drawer. These are the 7 signs...