Our cabinetmakers really deliver the goods

At Morning we have a slightly mad ambition: to invent the office of tomorrow.

But the real one, the office with legs and a top, on which you rest your laptop and leave coffee rings with your mug.

It all began in 2017 when we took on interns from the École Boulle (one of the finest cabinetmaking and joinery schools in France, Simply the Best as Tina Turner would say) in order to develop our first desk model and to think up furniture that met the specific needs of each of our spaces. Since then, three talented people have been working full time on the development and manufacture of exclusive furniture, in a workshop every bit as unconventional as the approach behind it.

Welcome to Morning, Gallieni!

To find Soline, Julian and Martin, here are the directions from the sat nav: take the ring road, head into Bagnolet, turn left… Welcome to Morning, Gallieni! A brutalist building from the 1960s that has been home in turn to offices, an Armenian place of worship and even an underground haunt for street artists. Today it is the turn of the Morning and OuiShare communities, along with our cabinetmakers, to carry on writing the story of this extraordinary place!

140 sq m of basement, its walls covered in the tags and works of those who passed through before, today house the wood, the machines, the prototypes and the talents of our cabinetmaking team. This floor space has allowed the team to invest in more precise, higher-performing machines and to work on more ambitious projects than in their former 30 sq m workshop.

While we're here, let's take a moment to introduce this team. Let's start with Soline:   2 years studying architecture followed by 15 years in the restaurant trade (she even had her own restaurant for 5 years!), she then went on to join the cabinetmaking course at the École Boulle and so made quite a career change. Martin spent time in the restaurant trade too; this Perpignan native has also been a landscape gardener, a head waiter, a vineyard worker in Australia and a technician in the pharmaceutical industry… before he too joined the École Boulle. An unconventional project, an unconventional place, an unconventional team!

The latest to arrive: Julian, our product designer, studied product design at the ENSAAMA, gained an advanced diploma (DSA) in product and furniture design at the École Boulle, then a Master's at the École Normale Supérieure… After stints at several agencies, the brains of the bunch landed at Morning, lucky us!

The quest for the perfect desk… and everything else!

Would you believe it, since 2017 some 2,500 desks have been produced for our Morning spaces, and since we reckon the best is not the enemy of the good, it is not one, not two, but a full three versions of the desk that have already come and gone.

Morning desks are 100% made in France, and each version aims to make them even more ergonomic and good-looking, of course. A simple design  (plywood, metal legs), clever (cable ports, socket-strip holder and hook for bags) and functional (easy assembly, sturdy structure), which make it the favourite desk of nearly 2,500 Morning members, or so we assume.

But the team's challenges do not stop there. Building a giant bookcase for Morning, Clichy? Done. A round bar 4 metres in diameter for the 7th floor of our space on Rue de Richelieu? Check. The challenges ahead: an upside-down set for an event, and why not, version 4 of the Morning desk?

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Our team's ultimate dream? To build seating for our spaces with no screws, assembled purely mechanically thanks to our machine of the future: the panel saw with numerical control. No doubt about it, this really is the dream of two cabinetmakers and a designer.

And if you would like to discover the job of Amandine, one of the other artists in the gang, head here