UC72

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.

UC72 was made for Marbella Design 2023 — and an opportunity to give form to some of Iñigo's unfulfilled design fantasies. Chief among them: a solid sculptural sofa. Wide enough to sit cross-legged and end up practically horizontal, with a single armrest and curved forms that are unmistakably AMBER.

The structural challenge was real. Filling the geometries of a piece with that much mass moving in so many directions — using irregular teak trunks — without building something unmanageable. The solution was a kind of Jenga construction: blocks assembled with structural confidence but deliberately not squared off at every joint, so that small gaps open up where the trunks meet. Viewed from the side, those gaps are one of the most distinctive features of the piece — an honest record of how it was built.

The seating surfaces are a different matter entirely: perfectly shaped, smooth, free of gaps. Finished in black, with the velvet texture of the teak alive beneath it, UC72 is one of the most tactile pieces we have made.