Edelweiss

Overview

Location: Cambridge, UK
Type: Product Collaboration
Year: 2026

Edelweiss began in 1975 with a Cambridge University physicist named J.R. Norman, who started tuning pianos on the side and couldn't stop noticing what could be built better. He brought an engineer's eye to an instrument nobody had asked him to improve. So did his sons. So do his grandsons. Fifty years and more than two thousand instruments later, the workshop is still in Cambridge, still family-run, three generations deep, building bespoke, self-playing grand pianos for clients who could commission anything and chose something handmade instead.   Wearstler and Edelweiss weren't strangers when Timbra started. For years, Edelweiss had been building custom pianos for her hotel projects — instruments meant to anchor a lobby or a lounge, chosen the way she chooses everything, for how they'd hold a room. That history is what made the leap to an actual instrument feel less like a pitch and more like the obvious next step: years of placing pianos and building a shorthand with the workshop meant neither side needed convincing that a piano could become sculpture without losing what makes it a piano. The only real question left was how far the shape could move before the sound gave out.

Creative Process

The hardest part of the process wasn't the sculpture— It was the instrument underneath it. A piano's acoustic integrity, internal structure, and proportions exist for functional reasons, not aesthetic ones, so every curve had to be worked out inside those fixed limits, with Edelweiss's own craftsmen translating what the sound would and wouldn't allow. Rather than fighting that constraint, the design leaned into it.

 The material did some of the persuading. Birchwood, layered and CNC-milled into the piano's rimless, wave-like body, was chosen specifically because its grain wouldn't stay quiet — each layer moves with the form rather than against it, giving the surface a depth no flat material could match. The finish selection followed the same logic: colors chosen to serve the wood rather than compete with it, each one meant to amplify the grain rather than cover it.

Timbra

Timbra trades the traditional cased silhouette for something rounded and rimless, its birchwood veneer built up in layers until the wood's own grain reads like waves caught mid-motion. Underneath the sculpture is still an instrument: a patented welded steel frame and Sitka spruce soundboard doing the acoustic work, plus self-playing technology built in so the piece can perform on its own.

The finished piece didn't stay in a showroom. Timbra now lives at Palma, the restaurant at Santa Monica Proper, installed as a working instrument rather than staged as a design object — the same way Edelweiss pianos have anchored Wearstler's hotel projects for years.