Tommaso's story is three generations long. His grandfather was a furniture salesman during the years of economic boom in a small town near Vicenza, Grisignano di Zocco (no commonplace stories can arise from a town with this name).
His father helped out in the shop as a child (when there were fewer psychologists and more masters) and thus learned the grammar of carpentry: recognizing well-built furniture, the characteristics of the woods, the assembly techniques. Once he took over the reins of the company, he directed it, with a curiosity then transmitted to his son, towards new perspectives: their shop sold the best Italian furniture makers, those who have made a furniture design history.
Then the first self-productions begin, but above all the trips abroad, in particular in Southeast Asia, where Tommaso's father discovers new essences: woods featuring colors and scents that seem impregnated with the spices of those distant countries and ancient processing techniques, that survived there by necessity, without that technology that had transformed the Italian manufacturing industry (but brought our great artisan tradition to its knees).
We like to imagine Tommaso, a smart and curious boy, wandering around the spaces of that large shop and listening to his father talking to a friend about the discovery of tamarind wood, tropical acacia and thousand-year old wooden joints, simple and elegant like the people who invented them.
Tommaso's father now lives and works in Southeast Asia, taking care of part of the production of the Kuda Design brand launched in the meantime by his son Tommaso and by Marco, his high school friend.
The ingredients of Kuda Design are all here: family traditions, passion for a job well done, friendship, curiosity and research.
What makes your products eternal?
Solid wood for us is a bridge linking nature with man. Using pieces of trunk to build our furniture brings us back to the values that are talked about a lot today: how nature should be used but not folded, the natural times that dictate the life cycles but also the right times for a good workmanship (both, necessarily, slow); and, again, the time that marks the grain of a wood and the characteristics of a piece of furniture made to last. Simple things have a long life.
Buy less, buy better?
Our furniture is built to last and to be passed on from generation to generation: the glues deteriorate, the joints do not. We do not engineer the future disposal of our products, because our products will never have to be disposed of. If anything, in two hundred years, adapted to other uses. Perhaps also for this reason the drawings that come naturally to us are linear, archetypal.
We limit ourselves to supporting the millenary simplicity of craft techniques: Marco and I love the pop of the Memphis style, we admire Sotsass... but then we produce things like this...
Even the vaguely Nordic flavor of our furniture was not an aesthetic choice, but the natural effect of artisanal techniques that, from Northern Europe to the Far East, mounted the wood interlocking, without nails, without glues, with natural oil finishes on which we continue to do research.
Contemporary design?
I prefer to call our style “Natural Design”. Our productive research has also become a cultural path. The craft techniques of Southeast Asia have led us to rediscover the great Italian craftsmanship, shaved by a massive industrialization that seems (we hope) to have had its day. And it is no coincidence that our production, initially located where the woods we are passionate about are born, has now partly returned to Italy...
What is your company's mission?
Teaching to buy a few pieces, but of value. Compulsive consumerism doesn't just ruin our planet, it makes our hearts sterile. And work only with young people, under 30.
