From raising mussels to becoming a table: furniture that recovers wood from the ocean

«I grew up among shavings and sawdust. “I have always been a carpenter,” says Fran Millán, the head of Frouma, a furniture company that looks for its raw materials in a place that, at first glance, seems unexpected: the sea.

Before setting up Frouma, Millán worked for furniture companies and traveled to different countries assembling furniture. “It was a very enriching stage,” he says, which allowed him to see both what is being done worldwide and what is happening in the industry. But it was also a very hard stage, he explains, because it forced him to be away from home for many days and to be highly mobile. “You are always available,” he says, with a very high work rate. “I wanted a change,” he reflects.

From the need for this change, an idea was born in which the anchoring point should be sustainability, understood at various levels: in the way of work, production, commercial or the use of materials. He also wanted to “claim the value of time”, the fact that things can have a very long life and transcend the passing of the years.

It is something that, in fact, used to be powerfully connected to the idea of ​​what a piece of furniture should be like, but that has been lost in recent years. It would be a bit like the classic piece of furniture that is still in grandma’s house after many years, the one that survives all the changes in fashion and trends, but continues almost as when it was bought decades ago.

Waste raw material

To achieve this, Frouma is also committed to the circular economy. The wood they used was one that, until then, had no use beyond some residual uses. Thus, their furniture is made with raft wood.

The rafts dot the Galician estuaries, where they serve as breeding grounds for mussels. Once the wooden crossbars that form them were no longer used in the water of the estuaries, they did not have a new potential identity. There were those who used them to make firewood and for something special, but it was a wood that had no use beyond that first useful life.

But what does wood rescued from the ocean contribute to making furniture? “The first thing is its appearance,” says Millán. “He has a very strong identity,” he says. These woods are exposed to the Atlantic, which causes them to gain salinity and thus achieve a different element of protection than other woods.

The raw materials have just spent more than a quarter of a century at sea. This maritime life also gives them a different finish. Thanks to the ocean they gain wrinkles and cracks. The sea gives them their own personality.

The sustainability of crafts

The fact that wood that comes from ocean use is used also means that the amount of furniture that can be produced is restricted. It is not about making them industrially, but in a limited way – something that connects again with the idea of ​​sustainable production. “The raw material limits us,” says Millán. The carpenter points out that they are not a factory, that the furniture requires a more artisanal process to go out into the world. They are unique pieces with very small runs.

In Frouma, they work from Ribeira (A Coruña). This seaside municipality is the point of origin of the brand’s creator, but it is also the place where they can easily and simply access their materials. Although the wood for your furniture could come from any raft and therefore from any area where they are used to produce these types of tools, the truth is that the rafts are mainly located in the Galician estuaries.

That of Arousa (in which Ribeira is located) is, due to the very nature of its waters, the most productive in rafts, which also leads to the turnover of its wood being slightly higher than that of other estuaries.

Therefore, to produce furniture with this raw material recovered from sea waters, a town like Ribeira allows working at “kilometer zero.”