What is techno-craft? For us, this term means to unify the know-how of the cabinetmaking and combine it with the latest technology. The sum of ancestral knowledge and modernity, like every piece of Thelos.
The craft of classical cabinetmaking has many years of antiquity and previously we only found the manual handicraft of pieces of wood and antique marquetry. Over the years, the production of furniture has evolved techniques and optimization, also economic, to adapt to new times and new manufacturing costs. This adaptation has gone through to mechanize some parts of the production with numerical control machinery (CNC), mechanisms to sand the pieces of furniture and the industrial application of varnish and lacquer finishes. It has been a radical change in some aspects, and it has had to train personnel intensely to be competitive and not to maintain extremely expensive prices for the manual cost of labor. But also other aspects of the production of furniture in the sector of quality cabinet has had to maintain some processes as they have been doing for many years.
These are the manual selection of the wood, with technical knowledge and experience of years, to know and intuit each piece of wood, that arrives whole in industrial form from tree trunk, and to not damage parts of the furniture that have a capital aesthetic importance in the final finish of the furniture. Only expert hands can make this selection. Then there are the intermediate steps where quality materials such as guides for drawers, handmade drawers, complex hinges, rotary mechanisms, etc., which also require technical expertise at the highest level, take place.
However, it should be noted that the method of assembling and gluing parts has not changed much, such as lace, joints, fastenings, etc., and are processes and details that need again the technical cabinetmaker’s job, transmitted from workers with many years of experience to younger generations involved in the development of high-end furniture. The finishing process, such as the final sanding of the wood, rounding, recessing, etc., also requires manual and painstaking work and no machine, for the time being, can replace this very delicate part of the production and ends the furniture ready for varnishing or lacquering.
From our point of view, modern machinery and robotics, however, not only serves to lower manufacturing costs and product optimization, but also an opportunity for design and creativity, to discover new paths of woodworking, and play with aesthetic and conceptual challenges, in order to obtain furniture that can be considered almost pieces of art.
At Thelos we like these challenges and to be able to go together with the designers to explore new horizons to create unique pieces and to transmit to the users this passion for contemporary objects of daily use, full of character and personality.
We do not know if in the near future the factories will be full of robots, but with our values and passion for the cabinetmaker activity, we will ensure that the human hand will be ever the last to finish each of our pieces, the only way to make them unique and singular.
