Tischlerei Bracht

Book a course at Tischlerei Bracht and you won’t build furniture on day one — you’ll set up a tool. Tuning a Kanna plane, sharpening blades on water stones, and only then the wood. That order is the curriculum: Dorian Bracht teaches Japanese joinery, where parts hold together without glue or nails through geometry alone — and geometry forgives no dull blade.

Bracht trained as a joiner in Leipzig and now works in Neukölln at the intersection of Western solid-wood furniture and the Japanese Shoji and Fusuma tradition. His book »Japanese Joinery« is internationally published; in a long-term project he has documented more than 120 wood joints — the courses draw on that archive.

Courses run bilingually (German and English) in groups of at most seven, on fixed dates through the year — from the one-day sharpening course to the four-day Joinery Intensive. The attitude to tools is remarkable: if you own old, rusty planes, you are encouraged to bring them and learn to rescue and tune them — knowledge transfer over equipment sales.