SADDLERY LEATHER

Leather entered Bohinc Studio's material vocabulary through the Betsy collection, designed for Uniqka and first shown at Alcova, Milan Design Week 2025. It began with a formal observation I have had for a long time: the way feathers layer one over the other across a bird's body. Not in a flat, orderly way, but overlapping, angled, building a surface that has texture and depth and direction all at once. I wanted to find a material that would allow me to work the same way, which is to build a surface from individual elements that accumulate into something larger. Leather, specifically saddlery leather, turned out to be exactly that material.

Saddlery leather is different from most leathers used in furniture. It is thicker, denser, and vegetable-tanned rather than chrome-tanned,  a process that uses natural tannins from tree bark rather than chemical agents, producing leather that ages well, breathes, and develops a patina over time. It was traditionally made for harnesses, saddles, and bridles: objects that needed to hold their form under pressure and last decades rather than seasons. Brought into furniture, it carries that structural memory with it as it does not collapse.

Each piece in the Betsy collection is made in Uniqka's Istanbul workshop by Kerem Aris and Merve Parnas, alongside their team. The process is direct and slow. The leather panels, which I think of as the feathers, are individually cut, treated, and then layered by hand onto wooden frames, one piece at a time, working across the surface of the form until the entire piece is covered. There is no shortcut and no machine that does this. Each 'feather' has to be placed, pressed, and secured before the next one goes on. The rhythm of the work is visible in the finished surface: a slight irregularity, a sense of accumulation. That is exactly what I wanted.

The pieces are fundamentally about surface: the console, the coffee table, the side table, the bench, and the standing mirror are all relatively architectural in their underlying geometry. The leather is what gives them warmth, tactility, and the quality of something that has grown rather than been manufactured.

One practical decision we made was to incorporate leather off-cuts wherever possible, the smaller pieces that would otherwise be discarded fit naturally into the layering approach, used as the shorter 'feathers' in transitions or at edges. This is not a formal sustainability claim. It is simply that the material and the process invited it, and it seemed wrong to refuse.