About Nanous

Hi! My name is Alvaro.

I am an industrial designer with a master's in innovation, but what I have always loved most is making things with my hands. When I discovered woodturning, something fell into place that I had been looking for without knowing it. I waited too long to get my own lathe. I do not intend to wait for anything else.

My workshop is called Nanous, a name taken from the nickname my family gave me, built from the word small. I think about that often. The lathe teaches you that the most important things are not grand gestures but precise ones: the angle of a gouge, the grain running through a knot, the moment you decide to stop cutting and let the wood speak. Turning is almost therapeutic for me. When I am at the lathe, particularly with a piece of reclaimed wood that has no predetermined plan, my mind enters a kind of flow, ribbons of wood flying through the air, the form emerging not from a drawing but from a conversation with the material itself.

I work almost exclusively with reclaimed and urban wood. Not because new lumber lacks beauty, it does not, but because discarded wood carries something new lumber cannot: a history, a surprise, a resistance. When I recovered sections of a dead jacaranda tree from outside the university where I teach, people looked at me as though I had lost my mind. What they saw was waste. What I saw was a bowl waiting inside a tree that had already lived its full life. The spalting, the worm trails, the live edge voids, none of that was planned. It was found. That is the practice I want to build: finding what is already there.

My background in design means I cannot stop asking how a piece can be both a work of art and a useful object. A bowl that holds fruit. A lamp that changes a room. A pen that writes. I believe beauty and function are not in tension, they complete each other. Every piece I make is unique, signed, and coded. It is made once and not repeated. That is not a limitation. It is the point.