The Slow Craft of Vegetable Tanning
March 26, 2026
A visit to the Tuscan tannery that has supplied our leather workshop since we began — and why their eight-week process cannot be shortened.
The Conceria Walpier, situated on the banks of the Arno in the town of Santa Croce sull'Arno, has been tanning leather since 1942. The process they use is older than the company — older, in fact, than almost any leather-working method still in commercial use. It takes eight weeks.
Chrome tanning, which produces the majority of leather sold globally, takes two days.
What Vegetable Tanning Is
Tanning is the process by which animal hides are transformed into leather — stabilised so they will not decay, made supple enough to be worked and worn. Vegetable tanning uses tannins extracted from tree bark (predominantly oak and chestnut in the Tuscan tradition) dissolved in water in a series of pits of progressively greater concentration.
The hides move through these pits slowly, over weeks, the tannins gradually penetrating from the surface inward. The resulting leather is firm, with a natural waxy surface, a characteristic sweetness of smell, and a capacity for patina that chrome-tanned leather simply cannot match.
Why It Cannot Be Rushed
The temptation — and the economic pressure — to accelerate the process is constant. Drums can achieve in hours what pits take weeks to accomplish. But the results are different in ways that matter. Drum-tanned leather is softer immediately but lacks the density and structure that makes vegetable-tanned leather improve with age. It will not develop a patina in the same way. It will not last as long.
The leather we use in the Ossian chair comes from Walpier's top grade. It arrives at our Copenhagen workshop already carrying the faintest trace of the Arno valley — something in the tannins, we think, or the water. It is this leather, worked by hand in our workshop, that will outlast everything else in the rooms it enters.