Design5 October 2026 · 2 min
Ana Vester: “I Only Trust Things I Can Pick Up”
The furniture designer on working slowly, building in public and why her studio has no computers on the ground floor.
Ana Vester makes chairs, tables and the occasional lamp out of a former print works on the edge of the harbour. Her pieces are heavy, slightly crooked on purpose and in the collections of people who could buy anything. We met on a Tuesday morning, among sawdust and half-finished prototypes. This conversation has been edited for length. (Ana Vester is a fictional placeholder.)
You've said you only trust things you can pick up. What does that mean in practice?
It means I don't believe a drawing until it exists. On the screen everything is perfect, so nothing is real. The moment you have a piece of wood in your hands it tells you what it wants to be, and it's usually not what you drew.
So the ground floor has no computers. Upstairs we do the invoices and the emails. Downstairs is only for things you can touch.
Your work is often described as crooked. Is that fair?
It's fair, but it's not careless. A chair that is perfectly symmetrical looks like it came from a machine, and then you stop seeing it. If one leg leans a few degrees you notice the whole thing. You start to look at how it stands. I want people to look at how it stands.
If one leg leans a few degrees you notice the whole thing.
You share a lot of the process online, which seems to contradict the no-screens rule.
It does, a bit. But showing the process keeps me honest. If I post a prototype, people ask questions I didn't think of. Somebody once asked why a stool had no place to put your feet, and they were right, and now all the stools have one.
Building in public is just a bigger workshop.
What are you working on now?
A table that can be taken apart without tools. Everything slots together. It's harder than it sounds, because a table has to be still, and things that come apart easily also like to move. We're on the eleventh version.
And after that?
Sleep. Then probably another chair. There's always another chair.