MONOCLE Magazine

issue 171

Monocle featured NUDO design in issue 171, in an Expo report on Poland's rise as one of the world's great furniture-making countries. More than a third of the country is forest, and Poland is now the third-largest exporter of furniture in the world - the article travels through the region that makes it happen.

It moves from a snow-covered sawmill in the southeast, through the workshops of the central manufacturing belt and the studios of Poznań and Warsaw. An hour outside the capital, it stops at ours.

The piece tells how the studio began. Domenico Russo and Kaja Ałaszkiewicz met in Italy, while Kaja was there on a university exchange from Warsaw. They moved to the UK together after graduating, and it was a furniture workshop in east London that changed the direction - Domenico left a desk for a workbench. "My grandfather was a woodworker back in Italy," he told the magazine.

We founded NUDO in 2018 and chose the Warsaw region to build it. Kaja explained the decision to Monocle simply: there is "a feeling that things are happening here". The combination of Polish craft and Italian heritage has been the point from the start.

Monocle photographed the workshop with pieces waiting to be polished, and noted something we have never said out loud on this site: the work is meant to hold to what the name means in Italian. Nudo - bare, stripped back, nothing added that the piece does not need.

The feature places the studio alongside other Polish makers and designers, among them the sawmill Kleniewski Tartak, the furniture brand Raw, Maja Ganszyniec's Nurt, 366 Concept and the School of Form.

Read the full article in Monocle issue 171, pages 178-179 and 186.