Why does furniture arrive without its story?

For many years I watched furniture enter Polish homes. The longer I watched, the more one absence troubled me: the furniture arrived, but its story did not.

Cardboard, plastic wrap, a receipt. We do not know whose hands made it, what it was truly made from, how far it travelled or what that journey left behind. Yet the objects we live with look back at us every day — and leave something in us.

Last spring I visited workshops in different parts of Europe. I spoke with people who can talk about a single weave of fabric for longer than some shops can talk about an entire collection. Weavers, carpenters, people who work with light. Each of them made objects with a hand and a story — and almost none had a simple route into a Polish home.

That is precisely where Design in Europe comes from. I want to shorten that route: from a European workshop to an interior in which people truly live. I want the story to arrive with the furniture — because a home built from objects we know affects us differently from a home built from anonymous things.

Today’s question: which object in your home has a story you can tell? And is it perhaps the one you like most?

Next week I will tell you about what is being created at the end of my own route — in my own studio.