NORDIC is a sample storefront built with Fatleon. This journal shows how a merchant blog page can look — cover, summary, photographs, and tables. To learn more about Fatleon, visit fatleon.com.

Workshop notes are more useful than adjectives. Oak, ash, and leather each have a job; mixing them without a table is how a calm chair becomes a muddy one. In the sample rooms we keep the table on the bench, the same way a merchant keeps sizes on a product page. It is not a catalogue of every SKU. It is a way of remembering what each material is for, before anyone asks it to look like another.

Each species has a job

White oak holds. European ash bends. Birch stays even and a little shy. Leather takes the hand, and then the mark. We do not rank them. We assign them, and we try not to change our minds in the same corner.

A dining chair in oak is not a lounge in oak. The LINNEA Oak Side Chair is a side chair: the grain should stay quiet so the room can keep talking. The ATELIER STOL Dining Chair is built to be stood up from six times in a meal; the joints and the oil have to survive that, not a photograph.

Grain versus gloss

Gloss is a promise that the chair will look new. Grain is a record that it was cut from a tree. We prefer the record. Matte lacquer is allowed when the sitter will put a wet glass down and never wipe it; oil is allowed when someone in the house is willing to oil. Mixing both on one object is how the object starts to look like two objects glued at the seat line.

What a photograph hides

Raking light will show every pore in oak and every glue line in a bent arm. The sample photographs are decorative. They are not measured drawings of a real apartment, and they will not tell you whether the seat is sticky in August. Stand in the room. If the timber looks like plastic from the doorway, the finish is doing too much work.

Gloss is how a chair asks to look new forever. Grain is how it agrees to look used on purpose.

Lounge dimensions, spoken not promised

These are studio defaults, not a promise for every SKU. Always check the product page before you plan a niche. A lounge armchair in our rooms sits at 400–420 mm, 720–780 mm wide, seat 520–560 mm deep. A wingback sits a little higher and a little wider — 430–450 mm at the seat, 760–820 mm overall, 500–540 mm deep. A low tea chair drops to 280–320 mm, useful only if the sitter expects to be low. An ottoman is 380–400 mm so a heel can rest without climbing. If your hips do not agree with the numbers, trust your hips.

The HELSINKI Plywood Lounge is the exception that proves the rule: the construction is laminated, but the face veneer still has to match the room. A plywood shell in a plaster room is quiet; the same shell against a walnut wall is a different sentence. Laminated is not a licence to ignore species. It is a different way of holding a species still.

• One timber that does the structure
• One surface that takes the hand
• One finish, not a tasting menu of sheens

Care, slow on purpose

Care is a calendar, not a product. We keep it slow so the chair is not asked to be new every Sunday. Fast care is how oil builds into a sticky film, and how leather is fed until it looks wet in photographs and tired in the hand.

1. Wipe timber with a dry cloth after a meal, not a wet one
2. Oil once or twice a year, never because a guest is coming
3. Keep leather a metre from a radiator; heat is how aniline goes tight

Mixing without muddying

Oak next to ash is a conversation if one of them is quieter. Oak next to leather is the usual pair in our rooms: the timber holds, the hide takes the mark. Ash next to birch is two pale woods competing for the same job — we avoid it unless one of them is a small object. Three timbers in one corner is a showroom, even when nobody is selling anything.

The point is not to own every species. It is to give each one a job, and then leave it alone long enough for the room to decide whether the job was right.