Artisan

Love wood

We love wood because we have known it our entire life. From the forest we played in as children, to the calling to which we have dedicated our adulthood. Because we love wood, we want to share this love with you by producing furniture for people who share our passion for wood and top quality furniture. Because we love wood, we collaborate with the best regional and global designers who are familiar with our technological advantages and who know how to convey the expertise into a vision that is worthy of this precious material. Because we love wood, our main production tools are the hands of our artisans, masters who daily turn designers’ visions into unique handicraft.

Respect

Wood and life are inextricably connected, and wood is literally life to us. Therefore, we use solid wood from renewable resources in our production, only environmentally-friendly materials for treatment, natural oils and wax that emphasize the luxurious and organic beauty of wood texture and that enable it to "breathe" naturally. This emphasizes the natural colour diversity, while the use of harmful chemical substances for wood treatment is avoided by using vinyl-based glue. We insist that, at the end of the production process, the furniture that adorns your living environment is as natural as the wood from which it has originated.

Rethinking

We give our wood only into the hands of those designers who share our love of wood. Our plant and our artisans are equipped and trained to offer designers as much freedom and options as possible in order for them to realize their vision. Further more we encourage the designers to create each piece with their own artistic signature insisting that every such piece is worthy of the precious material it was made from, thus conveying our philosophy of love of wood.

Innovation

In 2009 we founded the company ARTECO Wood Technology Center with the idea to make the company the driving force of a new movement in Bosnia-Herzegovina’s wood industry. The wood industry has always been B-H’s leading industry, but primarily due to the export of raw material. As a unique technological centre for the wood-processing industry, Arteco aims to reverse this trend, providing infrastructure and expertise in design, prototype production, work on state-of-the-art CAD machinery, woodwork machinery, finishing, preparation, raw material drying and help in the export of final wood-processing products. The company was set up in collaboration with the Excellence in Innovation project, supported by the USAID (United States Agency for International Development) and the Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

Touch

Hands are our basic equipment and the control point in our woodwork. From a tree to a chair, our wood travels from the hands of one artisan to another. Wood selection, its preparation for production, rough processing and assembling, finishing and protection… at every moment their sharp eye and infallible touch guarantee an individual approach that results in a top quality product or, more precisely, handicraft. While you’re sitting on an Artisan chair or at a table, or lying on an Artisan bed … be sure that each of your Artisan products was manually processed, assembled and protected.

History

The Artisan factory emerged from the traditional woodwork shop Ćostović, which conveyed all its love towards wood and 50-year experience of wood processing into it. Artisan specializes in the manual production of high quality furniture made from solid wood, and this insistence on manual, artisan work is what sets us apart. We acquired our first experiences by producing furniture for Dutch and British designers, and we started our own first collection in collaboration with the regional designers in 2007. Since then, our aim has been to reaffirm the philosophy that guides us with each collection, each piece of wood, with each designer’s vision and diligent craftsmen touch.

Process

We treat walnut, cherry, pear, elm and acacia wood only with superheated steam to reach an ideal color with an accentuated texture without jeopardizing the structure and ecological values of the wood. Wood treated this way, as well as oak, ash and maple wood, is prepared for natural drying in covered, ventilated storage facilities at carefully selected geographic locations best suited for natural drying until a critical moisture level is reached appropriate for the continued drying in computer-controlled chambers operating under conventional and vacuum systems using state-of-the-art wood drying software. We store wood dried in this manner under conditions identical to the living conditions of the people for whom the furniture is made. What follows next is the selection of wood from the storage facility and its cutting to the desired lengths and widths, machine processing and gluing into boards, drying and acclimatization. With precise machine processing, the wood is then prepared for assembling the end product, the cutting and cropping of the completed boards or elements in a traditional manner and through the use of a 5-axis Homag CNC machine. The final production stages are assembling and finishing work. For the finishing work we use natural oils, soaps, wax and varnish. These substances are mutually acceptable, i.e. they can be applied together to a given surface. The use of these substances (or the combination of the same) on dried wood ensures a longer lifespan, preserves its naturalness and improves the visual wood features – color, texture, etc.