Furniture that admits its joints

Halvard makes eleven pieces of furniture and has made the same eleven for nineteen years. Every one is joined mechanically — no adhesive, no concealed fixings — and every joint is visible in the finished piece. The company’s whole argument is that you can see how it is put together.

Its catalogue, at the time, was photographed in styled apartments with the joints out of frame.

Photography that shows the work

We rebuilt the art direction around a single rule: the joint is the subject. Every piece is shot against seamless mid-grey with one raking light from the left, close enough that the timber’s grain and the tolerance of the fit are both legible. No rooms, no props, no people.

This was contentious. The retail team believed context sold furniture. The first season under the new direction sold better, which ended the argument more efficiently than we could have.

A mark that survives being stamped

The identity is a single drawn mark intended to be reproduced by debossing into timber and card rather than printed. That constrained it hard — no fine strokes, no counters that would fill, no detail below the depth a press can hold in end-grain. What survived is simpler than what we started with and considerably better.

The wordmark is set in the same weight as the body text throughout, never enlarged, never given its own space. On a Halvard piece the mark appears once, at 11mm, on the underside.

Print

The trade catalogue is one colour on uncoated stock, section-sewn so it opens flat on a workshop bench. Specifications are printed in the margin at every spread rather than collected at the back, because the people using it are standing up.