Six years on, and our furniture collections have achieved a
unique place in the global market, and can be found in
private residences and prestigious hotels, restaurants and
public spaces around the world. By drawing together a
unique combination of heritage, craft skills and production
expertise from Europe and Asia, we have created an
international design brand with genuine cross-cultural
resonance. Stellar Works has much to be proud of.
I believe that this bringing together of cultures is what sets us
apart, both in terms of the character of our creative output
and the strength of our business today. From the beginning,
Stellar Works has benefited from the strategy and dynamism
of Japanese operations management, the high-end
craftsmanship of French furniture making and the technical
proficiency of our Shanghai production team.
When we opened our purpose-built factory in Shanghai, the
city was well established as an international hub for furniture
production, but for many brands, its factories were centres of
mass-market furniture making, dealing in low-cost, high-
volume manufacture with all the efficiency of the production
line, but little crafted character. A wealth of technical know-
how and traditional craft skill existed, but remained untapped.
We set out to change that.
The Stellar Works factory has enabled us to achieve two of
the key attributes we have aimed for since the company’s
founding. China’s favourable cost environment allows us to
create pieces that offer our customers unparalleled value for
money, but our approach to making ensures that everything
bearing the Stellar Works name exhibits the detail and
quality of the hand-guided craftsmanship that created it.
Yuichiro Hori
Chief Executive Officer and Founder
Stellar Works Co., Ltd
In this sense, one of the most important roles that Stellar
Works plays is the preservation and nurturing of craft skills
that the ease of mass production has placed under threat.
Japan and France both have a great tradition of hand-
making, but technological advancement and the rise in
outsourcing have eroded the skills base in both countries.
In Shanghai, we keep those traditions alive.
The other great benefit of our production facility is the end-
to-end control it gives us over the entire production process.
Because we assume complete responsibility for every stage,
we can custom-create pieces with an ease which many
other brands do not have access to and, more importantly,
we can guarantee the sustainability of our furniture.
Complete control of materials sourcing ensures complete
transparency – every wood can be traced to the forest it
came from, and every metal, fabric and leather can be
tracked to its source. It is because of this that all our
materials lead to final pieces that are simultaneously unique
in aesthetic, and stringent in quality.
Our role as a preserver of the past extends beyond our
production methods. The most obvious example would be
our vintage lines, which keep the iconic designs of 20th-
century greats, such as Vilhelm Wolhert and Carlo Forcolini,
in production, with a few material updates appropriate to
the modern day. But Stellar Works’ signature collections too,
could not exist without the aesthetic histories they pay tribute
to. Look over our contemporary furniture ranges and you see
glimpses of design movements from across the 20th century
– a touch of Bauhaus crafted functionality or the refined
simplicity of mid-century Scandinavian – often seamlessly
fused into the classic forms and patterns of the Asian creative
tradition. When I look at a collection such as Lunar, for
example, I see the patterns of time-honoured decorative arts
from China refined into Nordic simplicity and comfort by the
Danish studio Space Copenhagen.
Designs and designers like these are the creative heart of our
company. Without exception, they have an instinctive
understanding of the Stellar Works mission and a talent for
drawing and combining creative inspiration and craft
technique from multiple places and periods. It would be only
too easy to end up with a product that didn’t work – a clash
of cultures or a conceptual mismatch – but Stellar Works’
designers have a gift for harmony: they create furniture that
is both an extension of an existing tradition and the
expression of a new one.
We have chosen this path between the old and the new
because I believe good design is timeless design. A
particular style of furniture may be all the rage for a while,
but if it looks tired after a decade, it’s not good design – it’s
a passing trend. Stellar Works aims to be timeless. I would
like to think that 100 years from now, our pieces will still be
as contemporary and resonant as they are today and,
moreover, that Stellar Works will still be crafting quality
furniture that is Asian in inspiration, cross-cultural in design
and international in its scope.
L E T T E R F R O M T H E C H A I R M A N
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