Hand-built acoustic instruments made entirely from traceable timbers.
Every guitar is uniquely numbered and carries its own digital passport.
The collection
The endemic one. Ten timbers that grow nowhere but Australia, in a modified body proportioned by the golden ratio, with recycled timber that still carries its old nail holes. An embedded digital passport records the whole of its provenance.
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The hero of this instrument is Padauk, a blazing, vivid orange-red timber from Africa. This is a “Chameleon” wood, as it will change colour over time through the natural process of light exposure.
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Using reclaimed sequoia from the west coast of the USA. The soundboard of this guitar stayed submerged in the mud for decades before it was recovered and ended up in this instrument.
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Digital Passport
The maker
Tucked into an apartment on the Walsh Bay wharves on Sydney Harbour, desk34 guitars is fuelled by curiosity, a place where science meets art and every instrument is half lab experiment, half love letter to wood. It’s a passion project with a proudly geeky streak: each build is shaped by material sustainability, aesthetics and acoustics. Timbers are hand-picked, rescued for a second life wherever possible, and each guitar heads out the door with its very own digital passport.
The guitar-building obsession doesn’t stay at the bench. By day, Laszlo is a corporate executive, so provenance is a bit of a running theme in his life: it pops up in the boardroom just as often as it does in the sawdust.
These days, nobody builds guitars in a vacuum (the acoustics would be terrible). desk34 guitars salutes the generous makers who publish their work, share their secrets and let the rest of us peek over their shoulders. Enormous thanks to these extraordinary makers:
Casimi Guitars, Tom Sands, Michihiro Matsuda, Michael Bashkin, Ervin Somogyi, Trevor Gore, Driftwood Guitars, Toscano Guitars (David Gibson) and Pablo Requena. None of them can be blamed for what happens on this bench, but the bar they’ve set is exactly the one desk34 is reaching for, one shaving at a time.