BUILDING
LAZARD STUDIOS.

Lazard Studios started with a fairly simple idea: I wanted a place where I could make things.

Not just furniture. Not just woodworking. And not simply a workshop lza-full of expensive tools.

I wanted somewhere I could take an idea — however ridiculous it might initially sound — and figure out how to make it real.

Wood. Steel. Electronics. Fabrication. Technology. Design.

The workshop would become the place where those things could collide.

WORKSHOP 001.

The space itself isn't particularly large. It's a garden workshop in London, and right now it's still very much under construction.

There are unfinished walls. Tools without permanent homes. Machines waiting for benches. Systems that exist in my head but haven't been built yet.

And that's exactly why I'm starting to document it now.

I could wait until everything is finished. Photograph the perfect workshop, turn the lights on and pretend Lazard Studios simply appeared fully formed.

But that would miss the most interesting part.

How it got there.

THE WORKSHOP
IS A PROJECT.

I've gradually realised that I'm not really interested in building a conventional workshop.

I want to engineer the workshop itself.

Storage should disappear when it isn't needed. Machines should move into position when they are. Dust extraction, lighting, power and cameras should feel integrated rather than added afterwards.

The ambition is to create a small workshop that behaves like a much larger one.

LEARNING
BY BUILDING.

There's something else worth admitting at the beginning.

I'm learning.

Some things I know well. Others I'm figuring out as I go. There will be bad joints. There will be pieces of timber cut twice. There will almost certainly be things I spend hours designing before discovering there was a considerably easier way of doing them.

Good.

Those mistakes belong here too.

WHAT COMES
NEXT.

The immediate job is finishing Workshop 001. But several projects are already taking shape around it.

The Smart Workbench will become the centre of the workshop — part traditional workbench, part fabrication station, part machine.

There are ideas involving cycling, golf, furniture, hidden mechanisms, electronics and probably several things I haven't thought of yet.

Some will work. Some won't. Both are worth documenting.