Constantia Designer Craftsmen - Furniture Artist's

The place is "Constantia" and they craft extraordinary furniture from timber, in fact they created the Australian Federal Parliament table. The table is made of Queensland Grey Box timber plus ninety veneered layers of Honduran Mahogany and weighs two tonnes, cost two million dollars and can stand the fiercest blasts of cold or (more importantly) hot air and was designed and built at Constantia's Port Lincoln complex.

If you go there looking for a furniture factory you'll be disappointed..... if you go looking for an artist's colony you'll be delighted. Here they don't use words like carpentry and joinery -- they prefer "PHILOSOPHY, ARCHITECTURAL DESIGN..

Constantia was started by South African born Bernie Koker who mixes traditional skills with an untraditional approach. The craftsmen treat timber like it's sacred and have developed their own polishes because they don't like what's commercially available. They'll as easily make a dinning room set for a half a million dollars as a speaker system for serveral thousand. The pieces are all one offs and for a craftsman to spend two thousand hours of work on each, is not uncommon. The people at Constantia can talk timber longer than a politician on election eve... and the question time is available during their daily tours. Constantia is on the outskirts of Port Lincoln, South Australia and is open for daily tours during business hours Monday to Friday (other times by appointment) at $3. For more information email: info@postcards.sa.com.au