Preview - The Belgrade Apartment, Made by Hand

I am, first of all, a furniture maker. The interiors came later, when clients who bought my pieces started asking me to design the rooms they would live in. I accepted reluctantly at first. I have come to understand that the two practices are inseparable — you cannot design a room without understanding how objects are made, and you cannot make objects without understanding the rooms they will inhabit.

This apartment belonged to a retired engineer who had spent thirty years collecting mid-century Yugoslav design — Slovenian studio glass, Croatian ceramic work, Serbian textile pieces from the cooperative movement of the 1960s. He wanted a setting that would honour that collection without turning his home into a museum. Everything I made for him — the shelving, the kitchen, the bed frame, the dining table — was designed to recede, to create a neutral field for the objects.

The kitchen took fourteen weeks to build. I used walnut that had been drying in my workshop for six years. The joinery is traditional Serbian mortise-and-tenon, the same technique my grandfather used. When you run your hand along the doors, you can feel each decision — the thickness of the panel, the depth of the reveal, the particular weight of the brass pull. That is what I mean by making something by hand. The digital world cannot give you that feedback, and I do not want to work without it.

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