When someone commissions a center table from Raka Studio, they are not placing an order from a catalogue. They are entering a process — one that takes, on average, ten weeks from the first conversation to delivery. This is an account of what happens across those ten weeks.
The center table is the piece we are asked to make most often, and it is also the piece that demands the most of our process. It lives at eye level when you are seated. Every surface is visible. Every decision in the making will be read by whoever sits with it. There is nowhere to hide.
The Conversation and the Timber
A commission begins with understanding the room, not just the measurements. We need to know the light — morning or afternoon, direct or diffused. We need to know the other furniture, the floors, whether the space is quiet or busy. We ask what the client finds beautiful, and more importantly, what they find ugly. The brief emerges from this conversation.
Once the design direction is established, we go to the timber. For most center tables, this means selecting from our seasoned stock — planks and boards that have been in the studio for months, fully acclimatised to Lahore's climate. For larger commissions, we source fresh from the mill. Either way, the wood is chosen for character: grain pattern, figure, colour variation, the particular story the timber tells. We reject as much as we keep.
The selected timber then rests in the studio for a minimum of two weeks before cutting begins. This is not idleness. Wood moves with changes in temperature and humidity. Cutting into a board before it has settled in your environment is asking for problems that will appear later, when the piece is already in the client's home.
Shaping and Bending
The center table is where Raka's core technique is most visible: free-form bent-wood construction. Using steam and custom forms, we coax the timber into curves that would be impossible to achieve by cutting alone. A bent curve retains the full integrity of the grain — it flows through the form rather than interrupting it. This is the difference between a piece that looks shaped and one that looks grown.
This phase is iterative. The first bend tells us how the wood is responding — how it wants to move, where it resists, where it gives freely. We adjust heat, moisture, and dwell time accordingly. A figured walnut in cool weather is a different conversation from a red oak in summer. Each timber has its own character, and the bending process reveals it completely.
Once the primary form is established, the piece remains on the form for at least five days. Only then do we begin to consider the joinery. Rushing this stage is one of the most common mistakes in bent-wood work, and it shows — in spring-back, in inconsistency, in a form that looks uncertain of itself.
Joinery and Assembly
At Raka, joinery is never hidden. The way the parts meet is part of the design. Mortise and tenon, hand-cut dovetails, wooden draw-bore pegs — these are structural elements that are also ornamental ones. When a joint is visible in a finished piece, it must be as resolved as any other surface. This takes time.
A single mortise joint, done properly by hand, takes an experienced maker the better part of a day. We do not apologise for this. The table will be used for decades. It may outlast the house it sits in. The joint needs to be right — not approximately right, not good enough for now. Right.
Assembly happens in stages. We dry-fit first, checking for wind, rack, and gap before any adhesive goes in. If there is movement in the assembled piece, we find it now. Squaring, clamping strategy, the sequence of assembly — all of this is worked out in the dry run. Only when the piece sits true does the glue go in.
Surface and Finish
The final phase is where the wood becomes itself. Hand-planing across the grain, then with it. Card scraping. Progressive sanding through grits — 80, 120, 180, 240 — each pass removing the marks of the previous one. More sanding than anyone wants to do. But this is where the figure in the wood fully appears, where the colour deepens, where the surface begins to feel the way it should feel.
We finish exclusively with oil. Danish oil, hardening oil, or a custom blend depending on the timber and its intended environment. Oil does not form a film over the wood. It penetrates — it is absorbed into the fibres and becomes part of them. A piece finished this way does not sit behind a barrier of lacquer. It is the wood itself that you touch, and it will improve with age because of that contact, not despite it.
The final inspection is done under raking light: a single lamp held low and at an angle to the surface. Any plane tracks, any unevenness, any torn grain shows immediately under this light. If we see something, we go back. The table leaves the studio when it is ready. Not when ten weeks have passed. When it is ready.
That is the distinction that matters. A production schedule tells you when a piece will be finished. At Raka, the piece tells you.