Junto: a bespoke cabinet-making studio in Lisbon, where noble woods are worked with precision and a subtly expressive aesthetic

In Lisbon, in a small shared workshop, a lawyer and a designer discovered they had more in common than either would have anticipated: the same urgency to work with their hands, the same attentiveness to materials, the same instinct before wood. Zé Maria and Bernardo spent a year finding a name for what already existed. They called it Junto, because that was what it was about: building something together.

Today the studio brings together a team of six who work with solid oak, walnut, kambala and chestnut — certified, and selected for its behaviour, visual presence and durability. Each piece is made through techniques of manual execution: traditional cabinetmaking, Japanese joinery, Shou Sugi Ban charring. Processes that demand time and precision, and that produce results industrial manufacturing cannot replicate. Structure, surface, detail: everything responds to a logic intrinsic to the material, worked always with the grain and with the wood’s origin in mind.

Design through dialogue

Every commission begins with a conversation, around a table, with hand-drawn sketches and wood samples. Clients are invited to the workshop to see the raw material, to feel its textures, and to share in the construction of an idea. This proximity between those who make and those who commission defines the character of the studio: a domestic scale of craft practice that persists even when projects unfold across public or institutional spaces.

Junto’s portfolio spans private collectors to international architecture studios, hospitality brands and cultural institutions. Their pieces are present at the Fundação Champalimaud in Lisbon, on the Atlantic coast of Comporta, in projects by designers including Nicoline Beerkens and Alicia Murphy Design, and in spaces across the Netherlands, Italy and the United States. In 2025, the studio launched its first Signature Collection: a series of original designs that distil the workshop’s values, its understanding of process, and its commitment to material honesty.

Junto’s aesthetic is refined, functional and subtly expressive. They make pieces that hold against time, built to endure, in structure as much as in presence.

Project by Junto