01 · Selecting
Hides chosen by hand from tanneries in Tochigi, Tuscany, and the Horween yard in Chicago. Only back and shoulder make it to the cutting board.
About
A small bench.
A small bench.
A long apprenticeship.
小さな仕事台
Ishimura Leather began as a side bench in a Kyoto workshop in 2014, and now lives between two rooms — one in Kyoto, one in Berlin — where every piece is cut, skived, and stitched by a single pair of hands.
The maker
Ren Ishimura 作り手
Ren trained for seven years under a saddler in Nara before opening the first Ishimura bench in 2014. The discipline of saddle-making — where a single broken stitch can lame a horse — taught him that nothing in a leather good is decorative. Every line of thread carries weight.
His pieces are designed to be lived with. Edges are slicked by hand with beeswax and gum tragacanth. Seams are pulled tight enough to mark the leather. The finished object should feel, on the first day, like it has already been with you for years.
How a piece is made. 作り方
Four stages, none of them fast. A wallet takes roughly a working day; a tote takes a week.
02 · Cutting
Pattern pieces traced in silver pencil, cut with a round knife, skived at the edges so seams fold flat instead of bulking.
03 · Stitching
Holes pricked with an iron, then sewn with two needles and waxed linen thread. Each stitch is locked — never a chain that can run.
04 · Finishing
Edges sanded, dyed, burnished, waxed, and burnished again. The maker's mark is stamped on the inside, where only the owner will see it.
Two rooms, one bench at a time. 工房
The Kyoto room sits above a tea merchant in Higashiyama; the Berlin room is on the ground floor of a former bakery in Neukölln. Visits are by appointment — drop us a note from the contact page if you'd like to come by and watch a seam being pulled.