Three generations of joinery, one island, no shortcuts.
My grandfather built furniture for Dutch colonial administrators in the 1950s. My father repaired it for the same families thirty years later. I learned to cut a mortise before I knew what it was called. When I returned to Waingapu from Jakarta in 2016, I came back to the workshop.
Sumba has always had the right materials: teak from managed hillside plots, suar in the lowland groves, ebony from controlled sources in the east of the island. What it lacked was a market that valued what was already here. Wungu was built to be that market — and to employ the people who already knew how to work.
We now employ twelve full-time craftspeople. Most were working in tourism or agriculture; several had fathers who worked in wood. The training is on the job, which is the only kind that works for joinery. None of our pieces are produced by machine. Some of them take three weeks to build.
— Yohannes Umbu Hina, founder