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A hand-knitted pouf fashioned in dark gray New Zealand wool captured our imaginations on a recent visit to Ornamo, a remarkable design store in Pioneer Square. The gauge of the stitches is super-sized—did a troupe of needle-wielding grandmothers take up with a surrealist collective?

Ornamo proprietor Brian Balmert explains that the pouf’s Rotterdam-based designer, Christien Meinderstma, realizes her designs by working with artisan knitters. The result marries a clever concept with a warm and welcoming place to sit. “Meinderstma is one of many young designers who are approaching the world of craft to execute their ideas,” Balmert says.

In the most basic sense, craft means the same thing today as it did hundreds of years ago. In trades such as metalsmithing, woodworking, felting and weaving, the methods and tools used to make things by hand haven’t changed much. Yet while handmade production has remained the same, computer-assisted and laser technologies have developed rapidly—and industrial designers have often embraced them for their ability to approach visual perfection.

In Balmert’s view, these perfect creations feel rarefied, as if placed on a pedestal. “It’s like the design object,” he says. “It’s no longer about a piece of furniture that suits the way you live—or that’s comfortable and well made.” Design that expresses itself through craft brings back the human hand and makes room for personal connections.

Keeping Personality and Materials Intact
Designer Stefan Gulassa of Gulassa & Co., a fabrication and design facility of high-end furniture and architectural details, believes that the best designs are the result of design, fabrication and production management happening in the same place. “It allows for an incredible cross-pollination,” he says.

Whether a custom design or a line item, every Gulassa piece is made to order—by an individual. The designer says he can look at the steel loops that form the framework of the company’s silk crepe chandeliers and tell which fabricator made them. “That’s the highest aspect of our proximity to each other,” Gulassa says.

Just as Gulassa values the individuality of each artisan’s hand, he also celebrates the unique aspects of the materials: A hot-rolled steel tabletop shows the mark of metalsmithing tools; cast glass wears varied bubble patterns in its surface. “You have to be excited about the serendipitous nature of the material,” the designer explains.

Consider the arts and crafts movement, a reaction to mass production and industrialization in the 19th century that focused on craftsmanship, truth and honesty in materials. “It’s that spirit that has given us our gestalt,” Gulassa says.

The Importance of an Editorial Eye
At Piano Nobile, a new design studio in Ballard, a group of five artists, designers and builders apply a combination of structure and surface design, fine art and fine craft to a range of handmade products and architectural projects.

On our first visit to the studio, artist and designer Isabelle Grizzard Robertson was making hand-printed textiles with woodblock letter forms from an old printing press. Her brother-in-law, Chad Robertson, a craftsman and architect, was working on a bed and on an ongoing personal project: his lapstrake boat.

The printmaker and woodworker explain that art and craft were central to their upbringings and that an early hands-on approach to making things balances the more conceptual side of their educations: Grizzard Robertson honed her art skills at Cooper Union, while Robertson earned a degree in architecture from the University of Washington.

On the flip side, their formal training taught them to look at design solutions with an editorial eye. “With any process, there are always tricks to show your level of craft. Sometimes approaching [a project] purely from a design perspective is good because you are able to edit yourself and to show some restraint,” Robertson says. A critical self-review, and feedback from fellow collaborators in the studio, ensure that the appropriate materials and techniques are used to find the most elegant solution.

When Designer is Craftsperson
After a long career as an urban planner, designer Laura Yeats went on a “soul-searching mission” and decided to become a woodworker. “I’d had no modeling for anything artistic in my family. The only exposure that I’d had was in architecture school when I used the wood shop for model making,” Yeats says. For her, one of the first questions was how best to learn the skill—from craftspeople or by returning to design school. Yeats pursued several “intensives” at craft schools such as Haystack in Maine and Penland in North Carolina, but ultimately decided against a full-blown design program.

“I didn’t want to follow studio furniture art. I’m more motivated by function, quality and craft, work that’s more about architecture than art,” she says. As Yeats developed her skills and apprenticed with a local furniture maker, she was advised to stick with a design-only business model and to leave the execution to other craftspeople. “But that didn’t resonate with me,” Yeats says. “I want to be able to design it, and I want to be able to make it.”

“When I started making furniture, it was always design first: Flesh out the design, [then] find the materials, build it,” she says, explaining the evolution of her process. “It was more heady—and about wanting the design to be pure. Now it’s the opposite.”

At the moment, Yeats concentrates primarily on making bowls with green wood. “No two bowls are the same. I’m completely reacting to the material now. When I started, I wanted the bowls to be perfect—but you can’t achieve perfection because the wood moves and cracks. It was an interesting process learning how to let go.”

A Strong Sense of Vision
The design-craft duo at Meyer Wells builds elemental modern furniture from local reclaimed urban trees. Designer John Wells describes the firm’s work as a great offset to more mass-produced design. “I don’t like interior environments where everything is handmade by an individual artisan. There are too many voices yelling and screaming. Our work, intentionally, does not scream ‘artistic expression,’” he says.

Wells emphasizes simplicity: “If you just look at the material [reclaimed wood], it’s so overpowering. But we have a vision of something that’s not just material-based.”

Seth Meyer, master craftsman and the other half of the design partnership, describes their work as a weaving together of modern principles with a deep respect for nature. “The material, our aesthetic and [our] processes are balanced to solve a problem,” Meyer says. “To me, that’s what design is all about: art that solves a problem.”

An eye to the proportions and harmony of a piece start with a drawing or model that resolves some of the issues of structure and form; then the craft comes in and makes the natural material actually work with the form, Meyer explains. “It also begins with the milling,” Wells says. “Seth does all the milling for every log … he understands how the grain works inside the tree.”

Meyer and Wells cite critical touchstones for their work: earth, water, fire, air. “It’s important to remember that we are humans living on the planet in the middle of a universe,” Wells says. What are our priorities? “Let’s get back to what is really important: the elemental.” For the design-build duo, part of that expression comes from making beautiful things from fallen trees that aren’t far from home.

The Conversation Comes Full Circle
At the end of the day, what struck us most is how often we had reached out to touch something at each studio—soft yarns, smooth glass, cool metal, lustrous wood. Connection to craft is not just philosophical and emotional, but also physical, bonding the eventual owner and user to the stories and hands of the designers and artisans of every work.