The idea of founding a creative association came to me more than 16 years ago. Even then, there was a strong desire to make truly "soulful", lively things, which are so lacking among the variety of goods! I'm a fairly selective buyer myself, and I take a thorough approach to choosing the thing I need, whether it's a gift to a loved one or some kind of planned purchase for myself. Sometimes there was an idea of a cool gift, which it was not possible to find on the counter, even considering my perseverance and "willingness to go around the world for the sake of that very "Scarlet Flower". Therefore, I perfectly understand how important it is to be able to turn your creative idea into reality and get a decent result of your efforts.
It was this mission that formed the basis for the creation of the FORRESTLAB artel. Today we are a close-knit team of inspirers, inventors, imaginers and, of course, connoisseurs of the results of our labors! Every master working under the banner of "FL" today has his own "story" that brought him to us! Someone came with their creative ideas and decided to join forces to create a common project, someone is a wonderful performer of technological tasks, and there are those who acquired a profession and even a vocation in our artel, that is, mastered a certain business "from scratch"! And this is a special reason for me, as its founder, to be proud!
The uniqueness lies in the fact that we make a thing personalized in a single instance. This applies to photo albums, diaries, poetry books, etc. We work with several materials at once: paper, leather, ceramics, wood, brass. We apply the studied ancient binding technologies, styles of layout and processing of materials. We do the embossing on a large antique press. We use the ancient technology of creating the cover manually, as our ancestors used to do. We use traditional tools: brass knurls, fillets, metal cliches, bone ironers, wooden hammers, brushes, gold leaf sheets. Everything is done in order to convey the spirit of antiquity to the product that you pick up, following the old patterns. We manually age wooden parts, using only environmentally friendly (without chemicals) materials for skin aging and wood processing. We manually sculpt small ceramic parts, then cast a plaster mold – this is a long and laborious process. We have repeated firing of ceramic nameplates in large furnaces, to achieve the effect we create cracks, craquelure, patina, scuffs. We simultaneously combine stained glass, ceramics, gold leaf, wood, brass, turning the product into a masterpiece in a single copy. We carefully select the best batches of leather, most often we come to the leather factory, where we select the best skins in order to make new masterpieces from them later. We carefully paint it with Italian deep-penetration paints and wax it only with natural waxes and ganosis (which we cook ourselves according to our own recipe), giving it a naturally aged appearance. We manually apply traces of time "artifacts" using a unique technology specially created by us, which makes every thing unique, i.e. it is impossible to make a copy (woodworm marks, scuffs, greasiness, dents). We have a huge library of ancient materials that we have studied for creating books and bookbinding. Before starting work, we draw a sketch of the product, which accurately defines the future product in its nuances.
Kirill Konoplitsky
Founder and CEO of FORRESTLAB
