A Woodshop in Fort Bragg
Expat Hanneke Lourens is crafting a life, and furniture, on her own terms. From her workspace in northern California, the designer launches a handmade collection and shares an exclusive photo diary.
INTERIOR / BULLETIN / 14.06.24
Read time / 11 mins
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[01] Hanneke’s HOMEY photo diary captures moments from the furniture designer’s day to day work life on film. Starting at her home bordering a lush line of redwood trees, Hanneke loads the Corrugated Lounge Chair into her car.
Creative Director
Writer
Zooming with Hanneke Lourens from Cape Town, it feels like she’s on the opposite end of the world. Her small-town home town, Fort Bragg, is a three and a half hour drive north of San Francisco in the USA. Hanneke’s 8am is my 5pm, and although we are separated by almost seventeen thousand kilometres and her accent has a rare Afrikaans American twang, there’s no question that this is a conversation between fellow South Africans. Hanneke was born and raised in the even smaller town of Swellendam, a two and a half hour drive east of Cape Town, and vacations with her mother in Paarl for as long as she can every December season. There’s no denying her home country’s gravitational pull. “I’ve been out of South Africa for 12 years,” she says, “but somehow I still feel so connected to it. It’s hard for me to put into words. You kind of have to feel it.”
Hanneke’s HOMEY photo diary captures moments from the furniture designer’s day to day work life on film. Starting at her home bordering a lush line of redwood trees, Hanneke loads the Corrugated Lounge Chair into her car.
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Extra music stands on standby outside CPO's rehearsal space at Artscape.
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Koos also illustrated Simiso during his CPO rehearsal. “I’m enjoying my life, musically.” Simiso says. “It’s making sense.”
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The five white oak pieces in Hanneke’s handmade, made to order Corrugated collection. A percentage of each sale goes to Learn to Earn, a non-profit organisation in the Western Cape’s Khayelitsha township that addresses unemployment by teaching various crafts, business and marketing.
In the woodshop’s noisy machine room, this vintage Oliver bandsaw, often used for cutting tabletop veneers, is “as tall as it looks in the picture,” says Hanneke. “If I stand up and reach, I don’t know if I could touch the top.” In the foreground, the Corrugated lounge chair waits to be crated.
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Corrugated is Hanneke’s love letter to South Africa, based on the metal sheets that define its urban landscape. As is often the case when doing visual research, a particular shape stands out and claims a prominent spot in the creative psyche. “It’s not a normal wave. It’s very specific,” Hanneke explains. “It’s flat with a bend, and then flat with a bend. There’s some sort of triangular flatness to it as well.” To construct a single corrugated sheet in wood, Hanneke starts with six separate pieces. “I do a little bit of shaping, then I glue them together in a V shape. Once it’s in that sort of crinkle cut shape, then I have machines and tools that I use to shape it to that smooth corrugation shape. It’s a long process of coming up with a shape that I like and also coming up with a system I like of how to make it. I mean, I do use machines and tools, but it is handmade, so I needed to come up with a system that is repeatable and something that I can do over and over and it looks the same. Repeatable and consistent.”
“I always say, I don’t take myself seriously, but I take what I do seriously.”
Hanneke is in the early phase of designing her next collection, a process that can take months. After solidifying the concept through visual research, she’ll make sketches of her envisioned pieces. “Because I’m not great at sketching, I actually go into model making very quickly,” she says, referring to the miniatures she makes out of scrap wood as “my little models. Something always looks different on paper than it does in real life, and then when you scale it up it looks different again, and when you make it in the real wood it looks different again.”
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When Mikael Hanan gets an idea, whether it’s on a walk or in the middle of the night, he adds it to his Google calendar to be reassessed and either scrapped or shared with his team the following morning. The son of an analytical father and creative mother, Mikael embodies an ideal duality for navigating South Africa’s unstructured fashion industry. With a legacy in e-commerce operations and management as co-founder of Superbalist and second hire at ARC, Mikael is focusing on building his independent label, addressing fashion’s unhealthy relationship with newness in a constructive way while showcasing world class product to a global community of shoppers.
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FIELDS sweaters are knitted from Responsible Wool Standard-certified fibres, meaning the sheep are ethically raised on farms that protect soil health and biodiversity.
[01] Mikael wears his take on an office t-shirt in a formal mid-weight cotton piqué. On the blind behind him is the FIELDS brand mark, a totem designed by Daniel Ting Chong.
At her workbench, Hanneke prepares a shelving mock-up for a private commission in plywood. She enjoys listening to podcasts that make her feel connected to her home country, recommending Bathandwa Ngwendu’s interviews with notable creatives in Maak ’n Plan.
“It’s handmade, so I needed to come up with a system that is repeatable and looks the same. Repeatable and consistent.”
Hanneke’s grandfather was a hobbyist woodworker: she would play in his garage, gluing wooden blocks together as furniture for her Barbies. Growing up in a small town, “people were very creative but it wasn’t really called creativity,” she muses. “It was just a part of life and it wasn’t something that people really talked about.” And it certainly wasn’t presented to the high school graduates of 2003 as a viable career path. Accounting, engineering, medicine and the other mainstream academic suspects didn’t interest Hanneke, so she took an eight year gap year: “I was always like, ‘next year I’m going to study something’.” In that time, travels to Dubai, London and The Cayman Islands opened her mind and facilitated the crucial pivot away from traditional academic career paths.
FIELDS sweaters are knitted from Responsible Wool Standard-certified fibres, meaning the sheep are ethically raised on farms that protect soil health and biodiversity.
[01] Mikael wears his take on an office t-shirt in a formal mid-weight cotton piqué. On the blind behind him is the FIELDS brand mark, a totem designed by Daniel Ting Chong.
A fashion design course in London set the tone for Hanneke’s utilitarian creative career, working as a menswear pattern maker and for a womenswear cycling brand. She married a British copywriter who landed an advertising job in America, so off they went to Los Angeles. But the job proved to be unviable in the long term, nightmarishly time consuming and emotionally oppressive. The spouses made the decision to economise, putting their belongings into storage, moving into a mobile home and “living in the desert on a patch of dust” while waiting for the government to issue their green cards. “I bring this up because it was a change in mindset about life for us,” says Hanneke. “About like, what you could do with your life rather than what you should do. Do we really want the big fancy house and everything that comes along with it, including a mortgage? Or do we want to live differently, where we have a little bit more freedom?”
That freedom, and woodwork, brought Hanneke to Fort Bragg. As her husband began freelancing, Hanneke enrolled at The Krenov School of fine woodworking for an intensive two year, six-day-a-week course. “You never have to sit down for a test. You’re just woodworking all day every day. We call it a cult and it is a little bit of a cult, but in a good way,” she laughs. The pandemic cut Hanneke’s graduation short, and underscored her decision to call the coastal North American town (population 7291 according to Apple Maps at the time of writing) home.
“It’s a constant evolution. You might think, ‘oh, in the real wood it looks a little bit different, so I’m gonna make this piece a little thicker’.”
With her signature fuss-free ponytail and utilitarian wardrobe, Hanneke is a self-proclaimed note taker and to-do list maker — the kind of creative who thrives on clarity and structure. “Wood is always moving and changing,” she explains. “When you start cutting up a plank, you need to let the wood rest a little bit between each step. So there’s a lot of juggling like, okay, I’m working on this piece, but I also have to start cutting into wood for the next piece, so I’ll start that process early.” Nothing is left to chance, and yet, when asked about the tertiary education choices that have shaped her life and career so far, Hanneke frames her decisions as almost impulsive, spur of the moment. “I don’t know, maybe it feels like it’s kind of on a whim, but it’s actually something that’s been growing inside you for a long time.”
Another major calling card for Fort Bragg is Brian Newell and his partner Jennifer Anderson’s woodshop. Fully equipped with all the heavy machinery and hand tools a Krenov graduate could want, this renovated cow barn is where Hanneke rents a workspace. “He has the machines and maintains them. It’s mostly just the two of us working in the space, which is pretty special.” It’s also where she produces Corrugated, her debut collection of five contemporary furniture pieces, handmade in white oak, launched in May this year.
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In Fort Bragg’s neighbouring town of Mendocino, Hanneke captures “a very photogenic post office. It’s a beautiful little town, and the only place in our area that has good coffee,” she laughs.
At Hanneke’s workspace, her go-to refresher, a can of La Croix sparkling water, acts as a scale reference for her Corrugated collection models. These models are made on a 1:4 scale: “That means that every measurement is a quarter of what it would be in real life.”
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Amongst the hangars at a regional airport near Fort Bragg, Hanneke sneaks a behind the scenes shot of her bench (in the foreground) and console table during her Corrugated collection campaign shoot.
Hanneke keeps her geometrically diverse collection of sanding blocks in an old IKEA filing cabinet. Fun fact for all our non-woodworking readers: the shape of a sanding block must always be similar to the surface being sanded, so a flat block is used for a flat surface, and a curved block for a curved one.
Next up, she’ll construct the true-to-size mock-up, hot glued or screwed together with scrap wood to gage real life proportion. Countless tweaks later (she can laugh about that elusive exact number), she’ll construct the real thing in the real wood with proper joinery, all the while noting her process on a full-scale blueprint which serves as the official design document for the piece. “And then at that point you can still make some tweaks,” says Hanneke. “You might think, ‘oh, in the real wood it looks a little bit different, so I’m gonna make this piece a little thicker and this piece a little thinner.’ It’s a constant evolution.”
With Hanneke’s American summer fast approaching, she’ll be juggling the design of her new collection while promoting and fulfilling orders for Corrugated. She takes orders directly through her website: “The lead time is currently six to eight weeks. That gives me enough time plus some buffer room if I get multiple orders at the same time to space it out a little bit. I don’t,” she pauses, “know about getting someone in to help, because it’s so personal to me. But maybe it’s also just coz I’m a control freak,” she laughs. “I always say, I don’t take myself seriously, but I take what I do seriously.”
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The Corrugated bench is crated and ready to ship to New York for a shoot. Hanneke mentions that she was mindful of shipping size constraints when designing her collection but, “I think that’s too behind the curtain.”
In the machine room, the Corrugated bench waits to be crated in front of a Japanese jointer. This long green and yellow machine is used to flatten wood, an early step in the woodwork process before shaping and joining begins. A tall tool cabinet in the back provides a pop of earthy red.
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Performing at South Africa's busiest malls is an unmatched public relations exercise. “That’s the power of busking,” Simiso attests. “It opens doors.”
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Busking remains an integral aspect of Simiso’s creative practice. “When I entertain people and see them happy, I come home with a smile.”
Free time will be spent outdoors, trail running and off-road cycling. But for Hanneke, the real summer only begins in South Africa at the end of the year. On 25 May, Africa Day, she posted an Instagram reel of The Swartberg Pass’ showstopper mountain range just outside Prins Albert, the small Karoo town four hours north of Swellendam. Exploring South Africa’s nooks and crannies is Hanneke’s favourite pastime. “I’ve had my eye on Prins Albert for a while,” she says, referencing the town’s notable craft community. She recommends visiting the Van Hasselt family’s Frances V.H mohair studio and Gay’s Guernsey Dairy. “And then we saw this tiny little olive farm bordering the town and we were like ‘we can be olive farmers, right?’” She’s joking, but one wonders if in ten years she may just pivot to farming and jarring her own line of gourmet olives. “So yeah, we made an investment. We bought a little patch of desert dust with some olive trees on it. Now that’s part of our future as well.” —
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