#hand-built

#hand-built

BREMEN is designed to change the way people interact with music by allowing everyday objects to become actual instruments, thus removing traditional barriers to music-making.

This is just one item in a display that looks at how wood can be turned into all sorts of things that don't look or feel like wood at all. It's all because wood is a renewable resource and could be a viable replacement for plastics and other oil-based materials.

From unassuming hunks of Carrara marble and limestone, Matthew Simmonds carves realistic, miniature gothic cathedral arches, stairwells, and colonnades. Often based on architectural details of real places, such as cities around Tuscany and Germany's Bamberg Cathedral, the sculptures portray intimate details of corners, vaulted ceilings, arcades, and stairwells that can sometimes be peeked through additional apertures.

Off the Grain works out of Halifax in West Yorkshire, handcrafting every piece to order. Forget flat-pack or particleboard - here, it's all about real materials and genuine expertise. Skilled craftspeople cut, join, and finish each item by hand. You can pick your dimensions, wood, and finish, so the final piece fits your space instead of the other way around.

Your coding apprentice can build, at your direction, pretty much anything now. The task becomes more like conducting an orchestra than playing in it. Not all members of the orchestra want to conduct, but given that is where things are headed, I think we all need to consider it at least.

A compact garden suite in Toronto's Sunnybrook Park area, Copper House is designed to allow an aging homeowner to remain in place while creating a second dwelling where her adult children can return independently.

Rather than representing a simple return to the past, this renewed interest reflects a broader reconsideration of how architecture engages with materials, local resources, and environmental conditions.

I take the product apart. CAD it up. Illustrate each view. Then animate and lay it out for the web. That sounds quick, but it does take me quite a bit of time to create each one.

What began as a modest brief for a young and growing family soon evolved into a considered renovation that reimagines an existing Barwon Heads home. The original house had endured several unsympathetic alterations over the years, leaving it disjointed and built to a poor standard.

Baqiao bridges, including the nearby Shisanba Bridge, typically appear in areas where the difference between river level and embankment is relatively small. Their upstream piers are shaped like tapered spindles with slightly raised tips, creating a distinctive structural profile. Stone slabs span between the piers, forming a bridge deck assembled through interlocking construction methods.

The advertising industry has always been in the business of making things, such as the OOH billboard, the 30-second spot, the snappy social post, the standard website: final, finite assets polished and pushed into the world. Agencies were paid, often by the hour, for producing final versions of these things and then moved on to the next project. Even with generative AI entering the picture, much of the conversation remains focused on making those same things faster or cheaper.

Tons upon tons of these single-use plastics end up in landfills or even floating in the ocean. Spanish design firm PET Lamp set out give another purpose to these otherwise short-lived materials. Partnering with artisans in communities from Chile to Ethiopia to Australia, the company celebrates both Indigeneity and sustainability, drawing upon time-honored global craft traditions while supporting local economies and recycling discarded materials.

The Rural Cut places vintage fashion in Lebanon's Bekaa Valley, among vineyards, open fields, and the animals that inhabit the land. As a Beirut-based stylist, I worked with a fully Lebanese team to create a shoot that feels authentic, where each garment and every frame reflects the textures, history, and rhythm of the rural landscape. Photography by Angele Basile / Instagram: @angelebasile Styling by Rinad Saad / Instagram: @rinaaaaddd

Picture this: you're knee-deep in renovation dust, crowbar in hand, when something unexpected tumbles from behind century-old plaster. A yellowed envelope? A strange metal box? That moment when your heart skips because you realize you might have just found something extraordinary. For some lucky homeowners, these discoveries turn out to be worth thousands of dollars, transforming a simple home improvement project into an unexpected treasure hunt.

When Sean Spellman opened Dawnlands in Westerly, Rhode Island, last year, it was more than just a new address on the map. Conceived as an art gallery and gathering place, Dawnlands was built entirely by Sean and his family-no contractors, no designers, no outside help. Each board and bench was made with intention, using local pine and sensibility shaped by Japanese, Scandinavian, and coastal Californian influences.

Lighting is one of the most essential aspects of a home; it's also one of the most overlooked. The right illumination can create ambience, soften harsh edges, and imbue a sense of warmth. However, not all light sources are of the same quality. A custom chandelier, for instance, will always stand head-and-shoulders above the rest. These meticulously made creations can range from minimalist to monumental, bringing scale, ambition, and elegance into the room.

You know that feeling when you run your fingers across something and the texture makes you stop in your tracks? That's exactly the vibe British furniture maker Nick James is going for with his sideboard featuring sculpted doors. And honestly, it's the kind of piece that makes you rethink what furniture can be. At first glance, it looks like a solid oak sideboard. Clean lines, classic proportions, nothing too flashy.

Small businesses operating in niche sectors often face a paradox: projects become increasingly complex and large-scale, while the company's structure and resources remain at the level of a small, independent workshop. This is especially evident in architectural offices, design studios, creative agencies, and workshops working with unique physical objects. A church woodcarving workshop performing a full cycle of work on the creation of iconostases and interior ensembles for churches serves as a representative case.

How did a material conceived for bridges, factories, and large-scale structures make its way to the living room bench, the apartment bookshelf, the café table? For centuries, metal was associated with labor, machinery, and monumentality-from the exposed structures of 19th-century World's Fairs to the productive logic of modern industry. Its presence in domestic interiors is not self-evident but rather a cultural achievement: the transformation of an industrial material into an element of everyday, intimate use, in close proximity to the body.

A new office building that gathers several government agencies under one roof in the centre of Odense is a pioneer project in large scale timber construction and the largest timber office building in Denmark.