Meet the Maker: Senser Woodcraft, and the Case for a Sixth Finger

The first thing you do is count. A hand sits on the shelf, carved from a single block of beech, fingers spread, and for about two seconds it reads as an ordinary hand. Then you count again. Six.

The hand is made by Senser Woodcraft, a studio whose work we started carrying in the Moss and Fog Shop late this summer and have been quietly turning over in our hands ever since.

It is the kind of work that is hard to file. Part sculpture, part useful object, part joke that holds up after you get it.

So we sent a list of questions to Lydia, who co-founded the studio with her husband Hugo, and asked her to tell us where it all comes from. Her answers turned out to be about far more than wood.

A woodworking family, three art schools

Senser is older than it looks. Hugo founded the studio in 2015 with two of his cousins, and the three of them did not arrive at wood by accident.

“They grew up in a woodworking family in a mountainous region of central China, where generations of their family had worked with wood and carved statues for Buddhist temples” Lydia told us.

“By their generation, all three had gone on to study at art schools, and later continued their education in Europe and the United States.”

That combination is the whole studio in one sentence. Inherited knowledge on one side, contemporary product design on the other, and a decision in 2015 to see whether the two could live in the same object. The name came out of the same instinct.

“Senser comes from the idea of sensing and noticing small things in nature and everyday life” she said.

“Wood has always felt especially appropriate for that idea because of its warmth, grain, smell, and the way it changes under your hand.”

They have stayed with solid wood and natural wood-wax finishes, and they sand, then sand again, working up to around 800 grit or beyond.

“The final feeling in the hand matters enormously to us”

That’s not a marketing line. It is the reason their work costs what it costs.

Two workshops, one studio

Hugo and Lydia met in Paris in 2022, married in 2024, and settled in New York, where Hugo built a second Senser workshop. Today the studio runs on both sides of the Pacific.

“For some of our products, the earlier woodworking stages, such as rough cutting or CNC machining, are done in our workshop in China,” she explained. “The semi-finished pieces are then sent to our New York workshop, where we complete the final handwork, sanding, assembly, finishing, inspection, and packing.”

She is refreshingly direct about the label question that follows a studio like this around.

“There is often a lot of discussion around whether something is made in China or made in America. Our reality doesn’t fit very neatly into either side. We see the two workshops as extensions of the same studio, each contributing a different part of the process.”

There is no typical day. Some are spent sketching and adjusting proportions and trying a form in a different wood. Others are pure production. Because the batches are small, usually around fifty pieces of a design at a time, the two keep bleeding into each other. “Something we notice while sanding a piece in the morning can easily become the beginning of another idea later that afternoon.”

From a block of beech to a finished hand

We asked her to walk us through one piece, start to finish. She started with the problem rather than the process.

“A hand is probably one of the most familiar forms in the world, so even a tiny change can immediately feel strange,” she said. The studio spent a long time on the silhouette, the spacing between the fingers, and their angles, tuning it until the sixth finger reads as clearly unexpected while the hand still looks natural. Get that balance wrong and you do not have a joke, you have something unsettling.

The beech is rough cut with CNC for accuracy, and then the piece becomes handwork. Contours refined by hand, the gaps between the fingers cleaned and shaped, round after round of sanding. Those gaps are the slow part, small and awkward to reach, and they are also the part your eye goes to.

“For us, handmade does not mean pretending machines don’t exist,” Lydia said. “CNC gives us precision and consistency, but the final millimeters are still decided by a person, looking at the grain, feeling the surface, adjusting an edge, and deciding when a piece is truly finished.”

The sixth finger came from a six-year-old

The best origin stories are rarely strategic. This one belongs to Hugo’s niece.

“One day she was playing with her toy jewelry and had covered all of her fingers with rings,” Lydia said. “She suddenly said, I wish I had one more finger, then I could wear another ring.”

That became the More Fingers series, and the studio’s own summary of it is hard to improve on.

More fingers, more happy.

Lydia, co-founder of Senser Woodcraft

What makes it work is that the joke has a job. “The extra finger is funny, but it is also genuinely useful for holding one more ring, bracelet, or necklace,” she said. “The function makes the joke legitimate.” That sentence is a better design principle than most of what gets printed on the subject.

Beech was chosen to stay out of the way. “Because the form itself is already unusual, we wanted the wood to stay visually calm and let the silhouette speak for itself.”

Stones that do what stones cannot

The other half of the Senser catalog began with river rocks, and with the fact that nobody can leave them alone.

“They feel like objects that nature has already designed perfectly, irregular, but calm and balanced,” Lydia said. “People almost instinctively want to pick them up, arrange them, or try stacking them. At some point we started wondering: what if we kept that natural feeling, but changed the rules a little?”

The rule change is a magnet, hidden inside each wooden stone, which lets a stack hold a lean that gravity would never allow. From the other side of the room it is a quiet object on a shelf. In your hands it turns into a small physics problem you can keep re-solving.

“We also like hiding the technology,” she said. “You don’t really see how it works. You simply notice that the object behaves in a way you weren’t expecting.”

Sapele was the right wood for exactly the opposite reason beech was right for the hands. “Sapele has deeper reddish-brown tones and much more movement in the grain. Once it is shaped into the rounded, irregular forms of the Balance Stones, the grain flows across the surfaces in a way that makes each piece feel a little different. And wood has something stone doesn’t: warmth. When you see it, you want to touch it.”

There is a second set, cut from five different woods instead of one, which turns the same idea into a small lesson in what wood actually is. Walnut next to pine next to camphor, all shaped the same way, all behaving differently in the light.

The part nobody notices

We asked what detail in the work goes unseen and matters anyway. Her answer was edges.

“We spend a surprising amount of time deciding exactly how soft an edge should be,” Lydia said. “A perfectly sharp edge can make something feel architectural or mechanical. A very rounded edge can make the same object feel almost like a toy. Much of our work lives somewhere between those two.”

Sometimes it is a subtle inward curve on the lip of a tray, a decision that adds hours of machining and sanding and that almost nobody will ever consciously register. “People may never consciously identify that decision, but when they pick the object up, they can feel it.”

The same goes for grain, which they treat as character rather than inconsistency. “Wood is not a perfectly uniform industrial material, and no two pieces will ever be identical. We don’t see that as a flaw.”

Handmade objects on internet time

The honest answer to what is hardest about this work has nothing to do with wood.

“Handmade objects and the internet operate at very different speeds,” Lydia said. “Online, people naturally expect consistency, availability, and quick shipping. Handmade production is slower. Every piece of wood is different, finishing takes time, and sometimes an object that looks very simple in a photograph requires many more processes than anyone would guess.”

Her favorite thing to hear from a customer, she said, is that it feels even better in person. That is also the reason a studio this small still does markets and still works with shops, so the work can be picked up somewhere that is not a screen.

What is still in the workshop

We asked what they are making that nobody has seen. There is always something, she said, and most of it lives in the studio for a long time before anyone decides whether it deserves to be a product.

“One thing we are currently working on is a new interpretation of the Balance Stones. A visit to Arches National Park gave us a lot of inspiration, the unusual rock formations, the sense of balance, and the way enormous masses of stone can sometimes appear almost impossibly light.”

The prototypes exist. They are not happy with them yet. “So they’ll stay in the workshop a little longer. That is actually one of our favorite parts of making things: when an idea exists, but it isn’t quite ready for anyone else to see yet.”

We will be waiting. In the meantime the whole Senser shelf, all six pieces, are here in the shop, and if you like following a maker’s hands rather than a brand’s logo, our Reference Library is built on the same instinct.

You can also see what else arrived this season in the autumn collection.

Our thanks to Lydia and Hugo for the time, and for answering the question about the sixth finger properly.

Senser Woodcraft pieces are carried in the Moss and Fog Shop. We chose them the same way we choose everything else here, which is by liking them first.

Edited by Ben VanderVeen · About Moss & Fog