I recently had the chance to become better acquainted with Estonia’s plywood manufacturing heritage. Plywood is a versatile material, made by glueing together layers of cross-grained veneers, creating a pliable board that can be stronger than solid wood.

Industrialist AM Luther manufactured beautiful plywood office and domestic furniture, suitcases and hat boxes. His brand, also known as Luterma, established a sister company in London, Venesta (the name deriving from putting the words Veneer and Estonia together) in 1908 — although this website points to a much earlier start. It sold moulded products such as hatboxes, handbags and suitcases, which were marketed as lightweight and strong, and came in a range of sizes.

In the mid 1930s the company promoted ‘Furniture for Everyone’, producing flexible modern designs using standardised forms with interchangeable modular units that could be combined in different ways.

Venesta also provided the plywood that inspired some of the most radical modernist furniture designs of the 20th century, such as the Isokon furniture created by Walter Gropius and Marcel Breuer. The architects and designers loved plywood’s flexibility and strength, and experimented with it to create light and curved forms. For instance, the seats for Breuer’s Short Chairs were moulded in batches in the Estonian factory; they were shipped to Britain and then attached to locally made laminated wood frames.