We make furniture from what are considered the least valuable pieces of wood in the waste stream. Thin, narrow pieces of any type of wood. Our “Sondre” chair is made from wood that is minimum 8,3 mm thick and 60 mm wide. The length of each individual piece doesn’t matter for the production.  

 

– By dissecting furniture components into different layers, I can use smaller and thinner pieces of wood that normally don’t qualify for furniture production. 

Pieter Van Tulder, 2050 Furniture designer

 

We laminate different pieces of wood and incorporate joinery into the laminations. By gluing the laminations into deliberate shapes, we create the base product for our furniture that can go directly to the CNC-park. 

Gluing deliberately enables us not only to use very small pieces, but as well to determine our own tolerance of waste in the CNC-production. Instead of cutting everything out of a big, laminated panel – like it is done for example in traditional kitchen production – and create a lot of waste material in irregular shapes and sizes, we can determine how much waste we allow for ourselves.

We consider the production to have two sections. A sensitive part, and a non-sensitive part.

First part is the recycling in the sheltered workplace. Here we allow both human and material complexity and sensitivities to play their role. This process takes longer than in a conventional furniture production. That is our unconditional investment in a kinder process.

This is compensated by the CNC-part of the production; a computerized, fast, straight forward production process that needs a start-up input, but carries on by itself during the biggest part of the production. 

We prove that the efficiency of automatization can compensate for a kinder and complex process. We prove that with the right mindset, these two go hand in hand.