The
Workshop

Every stone nest is made in Poland, by people, one at a time. It's made the way upholstered furniture is made rather than the way pet products are made, and you can see the difference in the object: a cut face that's been given a soft edge, and a cover that fits a form with no straight line on it.

Here's how it's made.

shelves of upholstery fabric rolls in the workshop

cutting a foam core freehand with an electric foam cutter — *cut freehand, the way the first ones were*

Precision-cut

The core begins as a block of high-resilience foam, the kind made for mattresses and upholstered furniture rather than for pet beds. The first stone nests were cut freehand, with an electric foam cutter. Now the outline is cut by machine, along a programmed path, so every core in a given size has the same outline.

The precision matters because the cover is tailored to this outline and nothing else, so the outline has to be exact.

the blade cutting through a block of foam

the core, cut from block foam

hands working along the rounded edge of a stone nest core — *the rounded edge, worked around the outline by hand*

The edge, built by hand

A machine-cut edge is hard and square, and that's what makes most foam pads look like pads. So the edge is built up by hand: a roll of foam is worked around the whole outline and glued in place, which gives the bed the soft rounded lip you feel when you run your hand along it.

It's the one step that can't be automated, and it's the reason the silhouette is built rather than molded.

the liner, fitted over the rounded edge

the curved panel of a cover under the needle — *the cover, sewn to the form*

Sewn to fit

The liner and the cover are cut and sewn by upholsterers, each one fitted to a form that's different at every point along its edge. The liner is a fitted sheet with an elastic hem. The cover carries a zipper that runs the full perimeter of the base.

There's no pattern to stamp out and trim. Each piece is made to the shape.