design & craft

Habitek

*original habitek works, in short habitek, is a Helsinki based, designer driven furniture brand and producer.
We presented our first experimental prototypes in 2003 and have since produced high quality series with Finnish craftsmen and companies. Our design work is carried out in-house. We have special interest in creating designs, which have immunity towards rapidly changing trends. We see our furniture as companions, who are there to serve you through the different phases and turns of your life. All Habitek products are designed by Kirsi Gullichsen.
Our most well known model is the small Morris coffee table, which has been in production since 2005 and to our great joy identified as a new Finnish design classic. Our furniture has been nominated and awarded in Finnish and Nordic design selections and has been acquired by private collectors of modern design.

Good design needs good craft

As we are a small company, we want to keep the production close to home and currently produce all the *habitek products in Finland. Our manufacturing and supplying partners are both big and small operators located around the southern half of the country, that is just below 66 degrees Northern latitude. They are all top notch in what they do. We have collaborated with many of them for more than a decade, building a mutual trust and fine tuning the manufacturing process together in order to achieve the best possible end result.

Material quality

We like our natural wood to look and feel like wood. In crafting and working the oak, ash, elm or birch we use, our aim is to respect the inherent characteristic of that particular wood. For us this means that we allow vivid grains and variations in color; in fact we love these, because it shows that we are working with a living soulful material. The patterns in oak are ornamentation enough for our turned oak legs. Whether veneered or solid, the wood is finished off with environmentally friendly mixture of oil and wood or soap, which lets the wood breathe. Our Morris coffee tables have been manufactured for well over a decade maintaining an excellent quality through the years -and that is one of the fundamental ways in which we differ from the copy cats we have inspired.

Production

Habitek designs combine industrially manufactured components to hand finished natural wood surfaces. This has been one of our trademark characteristics since the launch of the first prototypes back in 2003. Natural woods have a strong presence in our products and we are constantly looking into new ways of applying the craft of wood in furniture design. Functionality and beauty are important to us, but we also value the nice feel and high quality of a piece of furniture: in order to maintain this in our own production all the pieces are finished off and controlled by our dedicated craftsmen. But we are system freaks, so behind every piece there is an idea of a system which offers efficiency in production and variation to users.