Otelier is a sustainable design studio that creates furniture for modern urban life. Using a user experience design approach, we reimagine what furniture means in the context of today’s culture, economy, physical landscape, and psyche. The studio was founded in response to the staggering wastefulness of fast-furniture, as well as heightened need for flexible space in smaller homes.

Our first collection reimagines the standing desk from a design perspective in the age of COVID and beyond. The collection consists of a desk and a dining table, both height-adjustable with hidden electronics, humanized form factor, and functionality suitable for the home. Beautifully crafted in white oak, the tables are a huge improvement to the typical standing desks found in corporate offices, and create a comfortable and inspiring space to work.

Otelier takes sustainable practices as a given. Besides using sustainable materials and partnering with like-minded manufacturers, Otelier plans to use a circular economy model that allows customers to resell their used furniture on its website, encouraging reuse.

The Makers and Their Production Space
Otelier partners with a local East Bay fabricator who is an expert in wood and metal furniture making.

The Making Process
The first step in our design process is discovering what people need and how we can make their lives better. There’s plenty of furniture in the world already, so to justify creating a new product, it needs to make a positive impact. Once we’ve identified the opportunities, we ideate both in 2D and 3D, and hone in on a solution that can be manufactured at scale. We use a combination of traditional furniture making techniques with new fabrication technologies such as CNC tools.

The Production Model
We do small-batch production and occasionally custom dimensions of our current designs.

The Materials
We use FSC wood and zero-VOC Greenguard-certified finishes. Our electronics are PVC free and made by ISO-14001 and ISO-9001 certified manufacturers.