People search for the studio by name more often than we realised. It seems only fair to answer properly.
Every month, a few hundred people go looking for the studio by name and hope something sensible comes back. Until now, they have landed on a product grid. So here is the plain version, without the mission statement and without the paragraph about passion.
What it is
Studio CTH is our in-house design collection. Where the rest of the shop is curated, meaning pieces we have gone looking for from people who have been doing one thing very well for a long time, the studio line is drawn by us. Twenty pieces at the last count. Beds, dining chairs, a dining table, occasional chairs, a footstool.
We are not going to pretend everything on the site comes from the studio. It does not, and the curated pieces are some of the loveliest things we sell. But when a product carries the Studio CTH name, it means we decided the height, the depth, the fabric and the frame, and there is nobody else to blame for it.
The shop is the room. The studio is the workbench.
How a piece actually gets made
It usually starts with an irritation rather than an idea. A dining chair that looks right and is unbearable after forty minutes. A bed that photographs beautifully and has a headboard you cannot lean against. Somebody says the thing out loud, and if it is still bothering us a fortnight later, it goes on the list.
From there it is slow. A drawing, then a sample, then the sample living in someone's actual house for a month or two, being sat on, knocked into, ignored. That part is not romantic and it is where most things die. A piece that only works when it is styled is not a piece. It is a photograph.
The Marisia went through that. So did the Dominique, which has since earned its place among our bestsellers. What survives goes into production, and what does not goes in a cupboard, occasionally coming back out two years later as something better.
Twenty pieces is not a small collection because we ran out of ideas. It is small because most of the ideas did not survive the sample.
What we care about, in order
That it works. Seat height, seat depth, the reach of an arm, the angle of a back. A dining chair you want to leave after half an hour is a bad chair however beautiful it is. Proportion for real British rooms comes before proportion for a lookbook.
That it lasts. Honest materials, joints that are joints, and finishes chosen because they age well rather than because they photograph well on day one. Wear is not damage. A limed oak chair that shows ten years is doing its job.
That it is quiet. Nothing here shouts. The point of a piece like this is that it settles into a room and stops being noticeable, and then one day you look up and think, that is exactly right. If a piece needs to announce itself, we have made it wrong.
Why the pieces have names
The Rowan. The Sloane. The Jolene. We give things names rather than codes because a piece you can name is a piece you can live with. It is a small thing. It also means that in five years, when you want a second one for the other end of the table, you can ask for it by name and we will know exactly what you mean.
And the price
The reason the studio exists at all is that designing in house removes a layer. There is no brand in the middle taking a margin for the privilege of putting a name on something they did not draw. That saving is the whole point, and it goes into the piece, into the frame and into the fabric, or it goes into the price. Usually both.
The studio line runs to twenty pieces, from the Marisia dining chair to the Lorna table. See the full collection, or read how CharlesTed started.