FIELD NOTES
Two days in a joinery workshop in Brianza
By Plinth Studio · Jul 2025 · 2 min read
Nothing you draw survives contact with a workshop unchanged. That's a good thing.
We spent two days this spring at the joinery that builds most of our kitchen and cabinetry work, watching a drawing we'd sent months earlier turn into an actual object. It's a useful, slightly humbling exercise.
Half the details we drew got quietly improved by people who've built ten thousand cabinets and know exactly where a drawing is optimistic. A hinge reveal that looked fine on paper needed 2mm more. A joint we'd specified one way got built a better way, because the grain of that particular board ran wrong for our version.
The workshop foreman had opinions about almost every drawing we'd sent, most of them right. We've started building in a review call with the workshop before final drawings go out, not after — it's cheaper to be corrected on paper than in solid oak.
It's easy to forget, sitting at a screen, that someone has to actually make the thing you've drawn. Two days in Brianza is a good reminder.
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