Difficulty: Summiteer (Level 3)
Skilled artisans meticulously measured a wooden plank before deftly chiselling its surface with precision blades, carefully shaping the piece to perfection.
This is a type of woodworking found at A Collective Space, founded by Emmy Sandt and Sne Roy.
The design and wellness collective had its own intention: to be a place where mindfulness and healing met creativity and crafts.
For Sandt and Roy, woodworking is more than a homeware-making art; it is also a process that allows you to embrace your missteps and blunders.
“In woodworking, some mistakes are irreversible. You can only start again,” said Roy, the director of programmes.
“And that is the very definition of resilience, right? You keep going … It’s OK to start over from scratch. It doesn’t mean I wasted my effort; it means I perfected my skill.”
A deeply therapeutic craft
Roy, 35, and Sandt, 33, officially launched the collective in 2023.
Sandt, the head carpenter, was born and raised in Hong Kong to Finnish parents. She then moved to Australia at 18 and spent six years building wooden theatre sets, but the temporary nature of the work came to frustrate her.
“I felt quite disheartened by the way you would build something and then you would throw it away at the end of the show,” Sandt said.
“I wanted to have a bit more permanence in the stuff that we did.”
Sandt began to shift her focus to furniture. When she returned to Hong Kong, woodworking helped her through a tumultuous time between 2019 and 2021.
“I found woodworking deeply therapeutic,” Sandt said. “It was really my way to ground myself and to feel less dislocated from the world.”
Her partner Roy is originally from Kolkata in West Bengal, India, and moved to Hong Kong as a child before later working in education and counselling.
Sandt introduced Roy to woodworking shortly after the pair met in 2017. During the Covid-19 pandemic, Roy helped Sandt with different carpentry projects.
The women also realised woodworking’s potential to offer others a respite from the city’s stressful fast pace.
“In Hong Kong, we are not a very patient bunch. We are built for speed and efficiency,” Roy said.
“[But woodworking could be] a pleasant surprise … It can take you days and weeks, sometimes months and years, to fulfil a project from start to finish.”
Making room for connection and exploration
Every month, A Collective Space, stylised in all lower case, organises two sessions of “Crafts & Yaps”, informal hour-long gatherings of about 10 people.
The group chit-chats while working on a “mystery craft”, which is only revealed upon arrival. They work with their hands while Roy guides the conversation with questions designed to help them open up.
Their goal was to eliminate the need to be perfect, and the pair envisioned a gathering where participants needed zero woodworking experience.
“You’re gonna fail. It’s gonna be ugly, and that’s OK,” Roy explained.
