Ubud4 May 202612 min read
Hands that remember
In a workshop outside Ubud the chisel enters suar wood the way it did a hundred years ago — unhurried, along the grain. Pak Wayan measures nothing with a ruler; the shape lives in the memory of his hands, passed down from his father and grandfather.
Pak Wayan’s workshop lies fifteen minutes from the centre of Ubud, on a road that turns into a field track. There is no sign — you have to know it is there. You recognise it by the smell: freshly cut suar wood, warm and faintly sweet, carried all the way to the gate.
Suar is the rain tree. It grows wide and slowly, and its trunk carries rings that count decades. Pak Wayan chooses boards the way others choose fruit — by touch, against the light, turning them in his hands. “This tree already knows what it wants to be,” he says. “I only help it become that.”
The chisel enters the wood without hesitation. There is no technical drawing and no ruler — the shape lives in the hands, handed down by a father and, before him, a grandfather. Every strike of the mallet is certain, though seemingly lazy. An hour of work is a few centimetres. A whole tabletop — many days.
When I ask why he does not use machines, he smiles. “A machine makes a hundred that are the same. I make one that is the only one.” That sentence holds the whole philosophy of Sari Bali — and the reason we carry these pieces so far.
Ubud, Bali · 4 May 2026