Jannis Schäfer grew up between two kinds of precision: his mother's eye as a painter, and his father's hands as an engineer and craftsman. Neither felt separate to him. Beauty without structure felt unfinished. Structure without intention felt cold. That tension became his design language. He studied industrial design and later material design — in Germany, Italy, Spain — and somewhere along the way stopped treating material as a variable to be decided at the end of a project. Material became the starting point. The collaborator. The brief.

Today he works across objects, furniture, lighting and space — always from the same position: what does this material want to become? What story does it already carry? What is the most honest and alive version of this thing? He works with salvaged matter, bio-based materials, and traditional craft methods not because it's a trend but because it's the only approach that makes sense — ethically, ecologically, and aesthetically.His work has been commissioned across Europe — tables, seating, lighting, coat racks — each piece born from experimentation and constraint, from the material itself setting the limits of the design. That's where the most interesting things happen. He lives and works between Germany and Spain. Every place he has lived has left something in the work.

1. I believe the objects around us shape how we feel more than we admit.
2. I believe design starts with looking. At the material. At the space. At the person who will live with the thing.
3. I work from material, not toward it. The warmth of wood, the weight of stone — they are the fourth dimension of any space.
4. I experiment because without it nothing moves forward. Playful, hands-on exploration is how boundaries get pushed, how new materials get discovered, how the status quo gets questioned. Forming clay and firing it — that was an experiment once too.
5. I refuse what harms. Where does this material come from? Where will it go after use? These questions are not secondary. They are the brief.
6. Process matters. When a piece shows how it was made, it is more alive.
7. I design for the right lifetime. Some objects should last generations. Others should return — decompose, dissolve, become something else.