The workshop is not easy to find. It sits behind a nursery on the edge of Cartago, in a low building with a corrugated roof and a courtyard the maker's grandfather planted with lemon trees in 1962.
I — Beginning
Everything here is made to order. There is no showroom. The workshop produces roughly forty pieces a year — chairs, tables, beds, a small number of case pieces — and each one leaves with a single sheet of paper describing who drew it, who built it, and where it is going.
“A chair is not a design. A chair is the fifteenth attempt at a design, and the first one you can sit in for an hour without noticing.”
Habit
What has kept us returning is not the finish, which is very good, or the joinery, which is exceptional. It is the maker's habit of refusing to shorten a step. Timber is quartered and stored for two years before it is cut. Linens are washed three times before they are upholstered. Nothing leaves the workshop before it is ready.
