Minestrone Workshop at Habitare 2026 – All photos are by Henri Vogt.

Design. At Habitare, Helsinki’s furniture fair, Minestrone Workshop staged a pavilion that hovers between exhibition and lounge — deliberately so. The Helsinki collective built an immersive structure from 357 gossamer-thin spruce veneer sheets, each barely 2mm deep, milled from just three five-metre logs.

• RELATED STORIES: Read more Helsinki Design Week 2026 on Archipanic.

Inside, the furniture spoke the same language as the framing itself: nothing polished, everything mid-thought. Minestrone Workshop favoured objects that read as tools and trials rather than finished statements. “We wanted to bring a space to the fair that shows design before it becomes finished,” the designers told Archipanic. “We are interested in the process, experimentation and unfinished things—the stage where ideas are still moving and can change.”

The mood suited this year’s Habitare theme, Plot Twist, a hunt for small disruptions and happy accidents. Every piece traced back to workshop life: a workbench-inspired bench and chair, an architect’s square repurposed as the base of a cantilevered seat, a pegboard turned perch, broom heads stacked into a chair, a sandpaper-topped table, and a lamp spun from dust extraction hose.

What unites these pieces is a refusal to let materials settle too soon. “Often it is an accident, a mistake or a sudden idea that brings the most important turn to a project. We wanted to make a space where these moments are visible and allowed,” the designers note.

Fittingly, the Minestrone Workshop pavilion is built to disappear. Once Habitare closes, it will be dismantled, its timber redirected into future work — architecture as one more draft, never a full stop.

Behind the project sits Minestrone Workshop itself: a Helsinki woodworking studio shared by nine designers, born from a simple need to pool machines, space and knowledge. What began as logistics has since become an ethos, where working independently never quite means working alone.

In the end, this Habitare showcase was less about finished furniture than shared instinct — nine makers, one workshop, proving that the best ideas rarely arrive alone, and that collaboration, not polish, was the real material on display.

All photos are by Henri Vogt – Courtesy of Minestrone Workshop.