CORE is a minimalist furniture collection located in Milan, Italy, designed by Hannes Peer for SEM – Spotti Edizioni Milano. Solid wood carries a paradox: the most ancient of building materials is also one of the most falsified. Veneers, laminates, and applied finishes have made wood into a surface effect, something applied rather than inhabited. CORE refuses this logic entirely. Every piece in the collection uses solid timber in its full mass – no layering, no cladding, no decorative interpolation. Grain, density, and proportion do the work that ornament might otherwise do.

Hannes Peer brings an unusual credibility to this position. Trained as both architect and carpenter, he works with wood from the standpoint of someone who understands how it fails as much as how it holds. That structural literacy shapes the collection’s formal decisions: the pieces carry the weight of things built to last rather than things designed to photograph. The project developed through close dialogue with Claudio Spotti, founder of SEM, and that exchange appears to have sharpened the collection’s commitment to material truth over aesthetic performance.

The defining technique throughout CORE is bas relief carving – rhythmic incisions cut into geometric volumes that produce shadow and tactile variation across otherwise restrained surfaces. This is carving as architecture rather than decoration, closer in spirit to the tectonic thinking of Pierre Chapo than to craft embellishment. Chapo’s radical simplicity treated wood as structural argument; Peer extends that position by making the cut itself the primary surface event. References to Barbara Hepworth and Leroy Setziol are legible in the collection’s sculptural density, while Louise Nevelson’s compositional approach to wood as rhythmic accumulation surfaces in pieces like the Totem Cabinet, where verticality becomes the organizing idea.