Earlier this year, we had the opportunity to work on the wooden ceiling cladding of a church dating back to 1842. As part of the renovation process, the existing wooden structure had to be removed in order to repair the ceiling from the inside.
There were discussions about whether the same wood could be reused for the new cladding, but the removal process caused significant damage, making this difficult both technically and aesthetically. The old material had already been collected in waste containers when we first saw it.
What immediately stood out to us was that a large part of the wood was still structurally sound and could continue to be used. We brought the material back to our workshop and carefully sorted it, keeping only the pieces that still had functional value.
The boards contained numerous old nails that had to be removed, as well as multiple layers of paint accumulated through decades of repainting. The cladding itself consisted of two elements — wooden panels with a thickness of XX cm and profiled diagonal boards fixed on top of them.
Despite the complexity of processing this material, we felt it carried too much value to simply be discarded. Its age, visible traces of use, and layered surface opened a new direction within our ongoing exploration of reclaimed wood.
The marks left on the wood — nail holes, cracks, and remaining paint layers — became an important part of its character. Removing them completely would have required sanding away a significant portion of the material, something we intentionally chose to avoid. Rather than hiding these traces, we decided to preserve them as part of the material’s history and visual identity.
We began experimenting with the wood in the construction of our chairs, selecting the strongest sections for the structural frame. The visible imperfections do not reduce the strength of the material; in many cases, they simply reveal the passage of time.
For this series, we also adapted part of the chair’s construction. Because the reclaimed boards used for the seat were thinner (XX cm), we used a single solid piece instead of four separate slats on one side. The seat surface was finished with oil to stabilize the wood and prevent small particles from separating over time.
The result is inherently unpredictable. Each piece carries different marks, textures, and tones shaped by decades of use.
For us, the value of this material lies not only in its age, but in the possibility for it to continue existing through function in a completely different context.
