Manufacture — Bruges, Belgium
Furniture held to a machinist’s tolerance.
Auran builds seating, tables and cabinetry the way instruments are built: measured, jigged, and finished by hand until nothing moves that should not.
No. 04 — Halden lounge chair, oiled European oak
Commissioned by
Boardrooms, labs and lobbies since 1974
Selected work
Three pieces, cut from one standard.
Every Auran piece begins as a full-scale drawing and ends on a granite reference table. Nothing leaves Bruges until it measures true across its whole length.
01
Halden Lounge
Steam-bent walnut, wool bouclé. Frame joined with 14 hand-cut mortises, no fasteners.
02
Meridian Table
Quarter-sawn ash, up to 4.2 metres. Top flat to 0.2mm across its full span.
03
Verge Sideboard
Book-matched oak, machined brass pulls. Doors run on a 0.8mm reveal, all round.
The standard
Tolerance is the design.
A chair that racks, a drawer that binds, a top that cups in its second winter — these are not style problems. They are measurement problems. So we measure, at every stage, against numbers we publish.
- 0.1mmMaximum gap at any hand-cut mortise, shoulder or dovetail.
- 7–9%Moisture content at glue-up, held for six weeks before assembly.
- 0.2mmPermitted deviation per running metre on a finished table top.
- 60kLoad cycles every seating frame survives before it is catalogued.
- 7Hand-rubbed coats of hard-wax oil, cut back between each.
In the workshop
Eleven weeks, three hands.
A commission passes through the same three benches it did in 1974 — cutting, fitting, finishing — with a signed measurement sheet travelling alongside it.
Stage 01
Cut
Boards are drawn full scale, marked from a single reference face, and cut to a knife line rather than a pencil one.
Stage 02
Verify
Each component is gauged before it is glued. Anything outside a tenth of a millimetre goes back to the bench, not into the frame.
Stage 03
Finish
Seven coats of hard-wax oil, each cut back by hand, until the surface reads as wood rather than as coating.
We specified Auran for the crew quarters because their tolerances were tighter than ours.
Facilities lead, aerospace client — 2024
Auran supplies furniture to research campuses, flight-test facilities, boardrooms and hotel lobbies where fittings are inspected on the same schedule as the equipment beside them.
Commissions — 2026 intake
Bring us the drawing. Or the problem.
We take eleven commissions a year. Tell us the room, the load and the timeline, and we will tell you honestly whether we are the right bench for it.