How Steinway and Studio Paelis Bring Straw Marquetry Into Sound
written ALBAN E. SMAJLI
Inside the Steinway & Sons factory in Hamburg, sound begins long before anyone touches a key. It begins in the way wood is selected, bent, left to rest, carried from one station to the next. It sits in the smell of lacquer and timber, in the concentration of people who seem to know exactly how much pressure a material can take before it stops cooperating. The place has its own tempo, shaped by patience, repetition and the quiet understanding that every surface, joint and invisible adjustment will eventually become part of a sound.
During a visit to the manufactory, what stays with you first is the intimacy of the place. The factory carries the weight of an institution and still moves with the rhythm of a family workshop, where people greet each other across rooms filled with half-built instruments and where every station seems connected to the next through a chain of knowledge passed from hand to hand. A grand piano becomes itself slowly here, through many specialists, many materials, many moments of judgement that remain invisible once the instrument reaches a concert hall or a private home.
Inside the Steinway workshop, the piano begins with pressure, movement and wood dust, as each curve is guided into shape before the instrument takes form.
Curved wooden elements for the ARA Lounge piano are laid out in sequence, showing the quiet precision behind a form that later appears almost fluid.
It felt almost inevitable, then, that Manon Bouvier-Toth would bring straw into this world with such precision. The new Steinway & Sons x Studio Paelis Masterpiece Straw Marquetry Collection marks Steinway’s first collaboration with an artist working in straw marquetry, a technique that reached prominence in Europe in the early 17th century and was long used to refine furniture and rare objects with a surface that behaves almost like light itself. Straw marquetry carries a natural shimmer, a silky glow, a way of shifting under the smallest movement of the eye. In the hands of Bouvier-Toth and her Lyon-based atelier, Studio Paelis, this historical craft feels immediate, sharp and alive.
Bouvier-Toth founded Studio Paelis in 2016 and has since shaped it into one of the rare contemporary ateliers dedicated to rye straw marquetry. Her work moves through bespoke interiors, exceptional objects, wall panels and commissions for design professionals, interior architects and luxury clients, always with a language that feels precise, sensual and quietly architectural. In her hands, straw becomes a material of quiet precision, guided into surfaces that seem to shift with the room around them.
The piano’s body takes shape in the workshop, where the long wooden lines are held, checked and guided before disappearing beneath the final surface.
The frame of the piano moves through the workshop in open stages, with its sculptural lines already visible before the final body is closed.
Image by LE MILE
Inside the action, strings, hammers and felt are set into exact relation, bringing the piano’s hidden mechanics close to the hand.
A finished curve of the Steinway piano catches the light, turning construction into a dark, almost liquid line.
For Steinway, the collaboration opens a new chapter in its long history of limited editions and artistic partnerships, because the grand piano already belongs to a world of extreme making. Every Steinway carries engineering, memory, acoustic intelligence and status in one body, and the straw marquetry appears at one of the instrument’s most intimate points. It covers the inner lid and music desk, the space a pianist sees while playing, where the piano opens itself to the room and where the visual experience becomes part of listening.
The first sight of the finished piano came on the evening before the factory visit, during dinner inside Steinway’s Hamburg world, with glasses on the table, voices moving through the room and the instrument already holding the attention before anyone had fully gathered around it. Then the keys began to move by themselves. The piano started playing into the room with a strange, precise intimacy, as if it had kept someone’s touch inside its body. Steinway’s SPIRIO technology captures and reproduces the finest movements of a performance, from the force of the hammers to the movement of the pedals, giving the instrument a second presence that feels almost bodily when experienced up close. As the straw inside the lid caught in small flashes, the collaboration stopped feeling like an idea and became something physical in the room. A historic craft, a living instrument, an absent hand made present again.
The hand disappears, but the touch remains inside the instrument.
Inside Steinway’s Hamburg world, the wall of portraits holds a quiet record of the musicians who have passed through the house.
Image by LE MILE
Studio Paelis works with rye straw sourced from Burgundy, prepared by hand until the material becomes thin enough to follow light with extraordinary precision. Applied fibre by fibre across the piano’s inner surfaces, the straw gives the instrument a quiet luminosity that shifts with every angle and movement in the room.
Across the piano’s interior, the straw behaves differently depending on how it has been laid. In one version, the fibres open from a centre point and pull the eye outward with a quiet, almost solar tension. In another, they move in softer rings, closer to the way sound seems to leave the instrument and remain in the air for a moment. The names of the designs matter less than the sensation they create, precise, restrained and strangely alive. For Bouvier-Toth and her atelier, the piano changed the scale of the gesture. The straw had to move across a body that curves, opens, closes and still remains an instrument before anything else. What remains is a surface that seems to belong there, quietly intensifying the space a pianist sees before the first note is played.
The finished Steinway piano stands inside the workshop, with the blue straw marquetry opening across the lid like a concentrated field of light.
Because Steinway has been building in Hamburg since the late 19th century, the factory carries its history through the movement of work, through materials being handled, surfaces being checked and gestures repeated with the calm of people who know exactly where their part of the instrument begins and where another hand will continue. A small adjustment, a surface checked again, a detail hidden deep inside the body of the piano, all of it belongs to a chain of decisions that eventually becomes sound.
During the factory visit, this sense of shared responsibility became one of the strongest impressions, because the work moved through conversations, glances, familiar gestures and routines carried by people who seemed deeply aware of how their own task would continue in someone else’s hands. The instruments were handled with a concentration that felt personal, almost familial, built from training, trust and the quiet awareness that every decision would eventually reach another bench, another hand, another ear.
Seen from the Hamburg factory, the collaboration with Studio Paelis gains its force through a shared belief in craft as something carried by hand, memory and exacting attention. In Bouvier-Toth’s hands, straw marquetry carries historical memory through a surface that feels alert, tactile and completely present, shaped by time, pressure and an exact understanding of surface. On the Steinway grand, that language settles into the inner architecture of the instrument and gives it another sensorial layer before the first note is played. Between the Hamburg manufactory and the Lyon atelier, the idea of a masterpiece becomes something quieter and more precise, held in the patience of people who understand how much presence an object can carry when it is made properly.
credits
all images (c) Steinway & Son
