UC54
Teak "narcotrunks" from customs police auction
D130X45 CM
Year built
2023
Function
Aux Table
Status
On Display
The teak arrived through an unusual channel — logs seized during a drug trafficking operation by the customs police, and subsequently auctioned off as confiscated assets. Narco-cars, narco-boats, narco-trunks.
For most workshops, raw logs are an inconvenience — not a standard working format, not directly usable in conventional carpentry. For AMBER, a batch of dry, massive teak trunks is a luxury. The wood itself is extraordinary: expensive, dense, with beautiful grain, and almost never worked in raw form in Spain — it arrives here as finished furniture, not as material. We burned it. Deep, dark, with the velvet surface that defines the UMBRA series.
UC54 was born from a coincidence. At our marble supplier's workshop, a circular slab had been left aside — too small for its original project, with no clear destination. The stone was the right colour, the right mood. It only needed the right base.
We had just made UC27 — our first serious incursion into markedly sculptural silhouettes, mixing the same teak with stone. UC54 took that language and turned it circular. One leg takes a bite out of the marble top. Another emerges up through a circular hole cut clean through it, the burned teak breaking the surface of the stone. The narco-trunks carried abundant clean cracks — the honest record of everything they had been through. We left them all.
Where UC27 uses a central trunk with two lateral extensions and four floor contacts, UC54 takes a different approach — two overlapping trunks, offset, with only three points on the ground. Partly aesthetic curiosity, partly a challenge. And in solving it that way, the base became fully demountable, which makes transport considerably easier than it looks.
UC54 spent three years on display at the showroom of one of the country's leading interior design studios.
