I went on a tour last Wednesday that scratched a fantastical itch in me. At a two-storey warehouse, tucked away in an unsuspecting soi in Bang Sue is City Arts Limited – a site where the most intricate, elegant, and stunning furniture designs in Bangkok are conceived and realized. With over 100 staff and 20 years in the game, the team here produces objects that celebrate rare, craft traditions. From shagreen (stingray skin) to straw marquetry; lacquer and cast bronze; each vase, cabinet, and table is tailor made to perfection. And the best part? To guide us through the factory was Willy Wonka himself – Mr. Alexander Lamont.

After visiting the showroom next to Warehouse 30, I was already taken aback by the brand’s bold vision and their one-of-a-kind collections. At the factory, I was able to get an inside peek at the ideation and creation processes that go into these products. Needless to say, my one woodworking class and a lifetime of shopping at Ikea did not prepare me for the depth, complexity, and artistry present at Alexander Lamont.

From the very first steps I took on the factory floor, Mr Lamont established a clear dedication to sourcing quality materials. Unimpressed by the plywood available in Thailand, he started importing individual plywood sheets from Scandinavia and assembling them in house. In the first room we entered, there were workers making lightbulb sockets out of bronze and crafting wooden tiles embossed with the Alexander Lamont logo. To our left was the pressure and temperature testing room. Since most of their buyers are international, every order they deliver needs to pass through various different shipping channels, facing extreme heat and cold. By testing the integrity of the product before shipping, they can ensure it will survive the journey.

After admiring the different blades and saws in the woodworking room, we went to the straw room. This was the busiest room with over 40 artisans working at the same time in rows, carefully cutting and stripping the straw like clockwork. In fact, even the straw has an origin story. It is grown by a farmer in France who cuts it at the exact right time to be viable for straw marquetry. If the farmer were to wait for the wheat to be harvestable, the straw would no longer have the desirable qualities necessary for this work. Behind the room is a dyeing station with hundreds of different colors so the straw can be customized for any project. Once again, the dedication to quality was astounding.

This form of intricate work requires delicate hands and a keen eye. Many of the artisans were working on a sunburst pattern which required all the strips of straw to converge into a single point. Often, this pattern is chosen by clients for large wall panels, meaning a millimeter difference could throw the whole piece out of balance. From an outside perspective, it looked challenging, but also meditative. It is a practice I could see myself trying someday.

As we made our way through the rest of the factory, the artistry and talent in each room became abundantly clear. Workers carefully glued pieces of eggshell to lamps, in a process that takes up to two full weeks to cover the vase. The product design reminds me of the Japanese art of Kintsugi. Meanwhile, just a few doors down, were more artisans working with shagreen or sting ray skin. In Indonesia, sting rays are sold at the fish markets for their meat, with their skin often getting thrown away unused. I was absolutely dumbfounded to see how they were turning the skin into beautifully textured coatings for various furniture items. I saw a gentleman smoothing out a piece of red shagreen over a wooden box, carefully wrapping it around on each side. Even with several rounds of sanding, shagreen furniture has a uniquely porous and bumpy feel to it that is wonderful to the touch.

Following this, we walked up to the second floor where the R&D department, gold layering room, and Mr. Lamont’s personal office are located. The R&D room, as he admits, is a place where there is certainly more invested than made back. But the beauty is the ability of the team here to create and play freely without any boundaries. It’s this sort of freedom that allows them to set new bars for what is possible, eventually trickling down into the creativity seen in their yearly catalogues. 

Meanwhile, in the gold layering room, a small team of staffers layer individual strips of Thai gold on vases, creating an immense and rich yellow shine on each piece. As we made our way down the hall, we finally ended up in Mr. Lamont’s office. It was a creative’s dream habitat. The walls were covered in artwork and sketches for new projects, as well as photos from his travels. Along the shelves were hundreds of wooden trinkets and sculptures collected from all over Asia, South America, and the rest of the world. Dividing the room in two was a massive wooden archway, a beautiful touch of feng shui. It was clear from seeing this room that he wasn’t just dedicated to his craft – he lived and breathed it.

After a look inside the factory, I doubt I will ever see furniture the way I did once. It has completely reshaped my expectation of what the things around you can look like, should look like, and what you can expect from them. It is not enough for a table to be able to hold your objects. It is not enough for a cabinet to be able to store things. I’ve begun to ask new important questions like: how does this make me feel when I look at it? How can I bring something into my living room that evokes a particular emotion? I am certain I will be thinking about these questions and what I have learned here for many weeks to come. It is astounding to see what a team of people with a clear vision can accomplish. And it is finally clear to me now why Alexander Lamont is the gold standard for luxury furniture made in Thailand – it’s because it doesn’t get better than this.

Following the tour, I had the chance to speak with Alexander Lamont about the history of the company and how he got into the furniture business. Here is what he had to say:

Q：So you started in Bangkok?

Mr. Lamont：I actually started in Chiang Mai. I was there until my wife moved and we thought, right, Bangkok it is. So for the first ten years, we were here.

There’s a lot of detail about the beginning. How I found the first customer, what I was doing, why we set up the business. But the summary, the conclusion, is that the first customer asked me to do the thing I most wanted to do. In a way, it created the path. It completely supported the idea. And that’s the hardest thing at the start of any business — who are you going to sell to? That question tends to pull you in undirected directions.

The first customer was an American furniture company. They came to me looking for someone who could design a collection of accessories in various materials, organize production, and sell to them exclusively in the US. That’s hard to find even now. Somebody who can design, control production to a high quality, and give exclusivity. Most people fall in love with their product and want to sell it to everyone. America being the biggest money.

But for me, just starting out, they said: we want big stuff. We’ve got these vast showrooms. If you give us little bowls, we’ll sell them, but we want scale. So we worked on bowls fifty centimetres wide, candlesticks two feet high, things in stone, hammered silver, palmwood, bronze, celadon ceramics, crackle glazes, splash glazes. I worked on those for about four months with no guarantee of anything. Shipped the samples to San Francisco, met the buyer, and she said we’re having everything. Minimums of fifty pieces, a hundred and fifty pieces.

But I wasn’t the producer. So I went back to the workshops with the orders, and some of them refused after I’d done all the prototypes, worked out the pricing, explained everything. One ceramic workshop told me: to get the glaze you’ve proposed, we get one perfect piece out of ten. For a hundred pieces, we’d need to make a thousand. We don’t want all that waste. So there were frustrations. But the ones that worked, worked. And that became the propulsion for us. The start of strong, great, handcrafted pieces.

Over twenty-five years, that original company has almost gone bust. Huge changes in the market. The retail companies, department stores with experienced buyers who were genuinely looking for interesting things — all of them closed after the financial collapse. Their customer base, the middle class, just disappeared. Even for a small business like ours, the gymnastics have been extraordinary. In 2012, seven shops in Thailand were half our business. Today that’s about two percent. Everything is export now, and almost all our customers are designers. We build collections thinking at a very creative level in the market, while shops everywhere are shutting.

Q：Where did you learn design? How did you get started with it?

Mr. Lamont：Growing up in a family business in England called Global Village Crafts, which was importing handicrafts — firstly from East Africa and India, and as the company developed over twenty years, from around fifty countries across South America, Asia, and Africa. Those were the interesting sourcing parts of the world at the time. You’d go to Peru or Mexico or Nigeria and find this world of traditional craft, and we’d import it.

I worked every weekend, every holiday, unpacking wooden crates wrapped in newspaper — wood carvings from Nigeria, papier-mâché from Mexico. You touch everything so much that at a certain point you just understand, at a very instinctive level: this is good. This is beautiful. This is powerful. I feel the place through this piece. That energy of handwork and the materials of those regions was, I can only think, the biggest education that led me to be fairly particular about why we want to use natural materials, why we want to learn skills. Obviously different from those traditional crafts, but we want the pieces to feel like we made them. This is who we are.

If I’d gone to design school, I don’t think we’d ever have run this company. School tends to tell you — in design especially, as I see it — this is how you think about it, this is how you approach the client, this is what they want. There’s a certain way of doing it. I didn’t have any of those rules. I was running around trying things, and we’re still doing that. There’s no guidebook. There’s no trend we’re following. We’re trying to push what we do to surprise very sophisticated clients.

Interior designers spend all their time looking. They’re always asking themselves, what am I going to bring the client? What will fit there? They feel they’ve seen everything. So to go to Paris and show them something and have them say, this is great, this is unique — that’s the challenge. That’s what drives everything. And then you need people in the workshops who get it. Because drawing something is one thing, but to actually bring all those parts together — to get the shagreen perfectly aligned with the bronze, when the bronze comes out differently every time — that’s too much of a headache for most people. For us, that’s just bread and butter. There’s no shortcut. Just time, and an acceptance that complexity is part of it.

Q：How involved are you in designing each product?

Mr. Lamont：In the last collection, about sixty percent was my design and forty percent someone else’s. Next year I think nearly every piece will be mine, though the collections are quite small — around twenty pieces. But I’d say fifty percent of the design process happens after the sketch. The sketch is a dream. The technical drawing is trying to make it possible. And the actual making is the actual delivery — that’s where you work out the problems.

Take the piece that’s being drawn right now — each leg weighs fifteen kilos. So you need to think about the internal structure that’s going to carry that, but also make it usable. Someone’s going to deliver it somewhere and not look after it. You’ve got to make it strong enough for real life.

The downside of being here every day is that I hear every headache, and that can dampen your excitement. It can push you towards doing things that are going to be easy, safe. That’s the difficulty. That’s actually why it’s very good to work with outside designers too — they don’t care about your headaches. They bring a bold idea, and then I become a kind of intermediary, adjusting things for aesthetic reasons, for scale, for the thickness of a table edge next to the thing beside it, for how a door feels when you touch it. That’s hugely communicative of a good piece versus a bad piece. Their sketch, my knowledge of the process — the interaction between those two things improves the product.

Q：Would you say your biggest design philosophy is making something people want to touch?

Mr. Lamont：Maybe, yes. If you didn’t want to touch it, there’d be a problem. And there’s something that draws you in visually too. Most people, when they see the finished pieces, don’t even know what they’re looking at. If they see stingray for the first time, they have no idea what it is… but they’re intrigued. And then seeing it in different iterations, combined with other materials, that’s where things get interesting.

We use a busy palette of materials in a piece, but then we try to extract the heat — to have something that’s full of character without screaming anything. Take the tree cabinet in the shop: bronze tree trunks rising up, bronze branches extending out, the line continuing into straw marquetry, then leaves in straw marquetry, and those same leaves repeated in wood marquetry on the top. There’s a lot happening. But you wouldn’t look at it and think, they completely overdid that.

Part of that was a deliberate pairing back. A copy company had done a tree cabinet before us, and when we were working with the Colombian designer on ours, I said: I want to be as far away from anything they’ve done as possible. None of the gnarly, naturalistic quality of theirs. I said, I want to keep your idea of the tree but we have to be very sophisticated about how we use it. That’s what moved us toward stylized branches rather than literal ones. The leaves kept the essence without the excess.

That piece was nominated for an award in Paris. We didn’t win, but it was still a lovely event. First time we’d been shortlisted. Though I sometimes think these awards can be a bit of a scam. You pay to enter, everyone gets excited, and then their friend wins. The one that won was a very uncomfortable-looking chair from Peru. I don’t know what the criteria was. Ours was, I thought, gorgeous.

But in that world — modern design, Milan award winners — craft can seem to younger juries as a bit old, a bit vintage. They want something that looks cool and hip. And I understand that. But I want my chair to be comfortable, because you’re going to use it. A chair that looks like a sculpture is a sculpture. It shouldn’t be furniture. A chair that looks like a chair and is a chair. That, to me, is furniture.

By Ayush Madan

Photo : Mathilde Hiley