Pinalis is a small wood-turning workshop in Ortisei in Val Gardena, at 1,236 metres in the heart of the Dolomites. We work with a single wood: Swiss stone pine. Not out of a love of niches, but because it is the wood that grows up here and that this valley has worked with for generations.
Our wood comes from the surrounding area, from ordinary forest use — mostly from thinning and from windthrow. Forestry in South Tyrol is strictly regulated: considerably less is harvested than grows back, and clear-cutting is not permitted in protection forest in any case.
After storm Vaia in October 2018 a great deal of timber lay on the ground in the Dolomites. Working it up was not an opportunity but a necessity — conifers left lying are the nursery of the bark beetle.
Every piece is made individually on the lathe, not in series on a copy router. The wood is first sawn, stacked and dried — in the open air roughly one year per centimetre of thickness. A bowl you order today therefore has one or two years of waiting behind it, after two hundred years on the mountain.
We oil with food-safe oils or leave the wood entirely untreated. We varnish nothing: a closed surface would lock the fragrance in, and that fragrance is the reason people buy Swiss pine.
Swiss stone pine smells good, ages well, and many people find its fragrance calming. What we do not do is advertise healing effects. The often-quoted study on heart rate is over twenty years old, small, and proves no therapy. We would rather write down what the wood can do and where its limits lie.
Because every piece is made from grown wood, no two are alike. Grain, knots and colour differ, and fine hairline cracks at the end grain are normal. Anyone expecting a perfectly uniform product is better served by mass production.