Hanna Fischer makes approximately thirty pieces of furniture per year. She has a waiting list that extends to 2028. She employs no one. She has declined three licensing deals with manufacturers who would have multiplied her output by a factor of fifty. She describes her work as a practice, not a business.
“A business has a growth logic,” she says. “A practice has a deepening logic. I am not trying to make more chairs. I am trying to understand more about what a chair is. Those are not compatible with scaling.”
Fischer — based in a village in the Sauerland, in a workshop she built herself from a derelict barn — makes furniture from locally sourced timber that she seasons in the workshop before using. Her pieces are visually quiet: clean joints, honest surfaces, a vocabulary that reads as contemporary but contains clear debts to Scandinavian postwar furniture and to the quieter end of the Mingei tradition. A chair takes her between six and ten weeks. She prices it accordingly.
She is part of a loose cohort of designer-makers — mostly in their thirties and forties, mostly trained in design schools rather than craft apprenticeships, mostly with some experience of the commercial design world they have subsequently chosen to leave — who are working in this way. The cohort has no name and no organisational structure. What it shares is a particular relationship to time: the decision to let the work take as long as it takes.
“Design school teaches you to think about objects,” says Fischer. “The workshop teaches you to make them. Those are very different educations and they don’t always combine well. I spent about three years being a bad maker who thought very clearly about furniture. Then something shifted.” She gestures at the workshop around her. “Now I think less clearly and make much better furniture.”
The commercial logic of this choice is, on its face, difficult. Fischer’s prices put her work out of reach of most buyers. Her output is too small for galleries that need inventory. Her lead times are too long for clients who want furniture next month. And yet she is fully booked for two years, earns a living wage, and turns down more work than she accepts.
The explanation, she thinks, is that there is a hunger for objects that have been given full attention — that carry in them the evidence of time and thought and physical engagement. “People can tell,” she says simply. “Maybe not consciously. But they can tell.”
Leave a Reply