Wind, wood
and patience.
A small workshop that restores church and chamber organs, and builds a few new ones, one pipe at a time.
Est. (fictional) · Old town edge · Tallinn
The workshop
Three people, a hundred-year-old bench, and instruments that outlive all of us.
We take on organs that other workshops turn down: instruments with water damage, with pipes flattened by a fallen beam, with a hundred years of well-meaning repairs to undo. Most of our work is in small churches across the Baltic coast. The rest is building compact organs for practice rooms and living rooms.
Nothing here is quick. A full restoration takes between eight months and three years, and the pipes are voiced one by one in the room they will live in.
See a restoration step by step
The bench came with the building. So did the draughts, which turned out to be useful for finding leaks in a windchest.
i.
Wind before anything
An organ is a wind instrument that happens to be the size of a room. We start with the bellows and the trunks: leather is replaced, wood is planed true, and the wind is made steady before a single pipe is touched.
ii.
Pipes, straightened and listened to
Metal pipes are rounded on a mandrel, wooden pipes are re-glued and sealed. Then each one is played and adjusted by ear until it speaks quickly, without a cough, at the strength its neighbours expect.
iii.
Tuned in the room, in winter
Final tuning happens on site, ideally in the cold months when the church is at its usual temperature. We come back after the first summer to check what the building has done to it.
Materials
Slow-grown pine, quarter-sawn oak, and lead we melt ourselves.
The wood comes from two forests north of the city, felled in winter and dried for at least six years under our roof. Pipe metal is cast on a stone table in the back room, the way it has been done for a few hundred years, because nobody has found a quieter way.
6 yrs
Minimum air-drying time for any board that becomes part of an instrument.
1,200
Pipes in the largest instrument we have restored so far. Every one was taken out and put back.
2
Forests we buy from, both within a morning's drive. We visit them before the trees are marked.
The metal is poured at dawn, when the floor is cold and the room is quiet.
The Reed Room
Small organs for small rooms.
Not everyone has a church. The Reed Room is our line of compact instruments: one or two manuals, a handful of stops, built to fit through a normal door and to be tuned by the owner. They are made in the same workshop, from the same offcuts of the same forests.
- Practice organ, one manual, four stopsfrom a small number
- Chamber organ, two manuals and pedalon request
- Reed organ overhaul (harmonium)by the week
Restoration record (fictional)
- 2025Village church, two manuals, water damageSaaremaa
- 2024Concert hall practice organ, new buildTallinn
- 2023Chapel organ, fire-damaged case and bellowsPärnu
- 2022Harmonium, complete overhaulPrivate home
- 2021Town church, 1,200 pipes, full restorationViljandi