Sixty years, one house at a time

Wrenhurst has made furniture on Menorca since 1966. Three hands, one workshop, and one window that has never been moved.

1. 1966

   A shuttered joinery

   Alec Wren, a cabinetmaker of twenty-seven, bought a joinery outside Ciutadella that had stood shut since 1958. The money had been meant for a boat. The first winter went on the benches; the roof waited until spring.

   The name came from the hill of holm oak behind the shed — hurst, the old word for a wooded rise — and from the family working below it since.
2. 1974

   The first house

   A commission arrived for a whole house rather than a piece: thirty-one items, one enfilade, one short list of materials. Wrenhurst has worked room by room ever since, which is why this catalog is still arranged as a house and not as a warehouse.

3. 1982

   The catalogue that was never printed

   Eight hundred plates were shot for a first catalogue and then withdrawn. The pieces had been photographed across four seasons in four different lights, and no two pages agreed with each other. Nothing was printed that year.

   “A material photographed twice is two materials.”
4. 1988

   The light room

   A shed at the north end of the yard was rebuilt around a single window. Every piece, every colorway and every room has been photographed there since, under a light that is never adjusted between frames. The window has not been moved in thirty-eight years.

5. 2001

   The second hand

   Ilse Wren took the workshop and began the material library — each colorway photographed flat, square to the lens, once. A Wrenhurst brief has named its plates before its dimensions ever since.

6. 2010

   The rooms are numbered

   The house model settles. A piece is designed for a room, and a room is only ever shown whole. Nothing enters the catalog that has not first stood in one.

7. 2019

   The archive, plate by plate

   Mara Wren, the third hand, began photographing sixty years of work back through the same window: every surviving piece, at the same distance, in the same light. What you are reading is that archive.

8. 2026

   Sixty years

   Still built to order in the same yard, ten to fourteen weeks, by hand. Still delivered by two people who place it in the room and take the packing away. Still one house at a time.