Edelweiss

Overview

Location: Cambridge, UK
Type: Product Collaboration
Year: 2026

Edelweiss began in 1975 with a Cambridge University physicist named J.R. Norman, who started tuning pianos on the side and kept seeing ways to build them better. He brought an engineer's eye to the instrument, and so did his sons and grandsons. Fifty years and more than two thousand instruments later, the workshop is still in Cambridge, still family-run, three generations deep, building bespoke, self-playing grand pianos for clients who could commission anything and chose something handmade instead. Wearstler and Edelweiss knew each other well before Timbra started. For years, Edelweiss had been building custom pianos for her hotel projects — instruments meant to anchor a lobby or a lounge, chosen the way she chooses everything, for how they'd hold a room. That history made designing an instrument together the obvious next step. Years of placing pianos and building a shorthand with the workshop meant both sides already believed a piano could become sculpture and still be a piano. The question was how far the shape could travel while the sound stayed true.

Creative Process

The real work was the instrument underneath the sculpture. A piano's acoustics, internal structure, and proportions all serve the sound, so every curve had to be worked out inside those limits, with Edelweiss's craftsmen guiding what the sound would allow. The design leaned into that constraint and gained from it.

The material did a lot of the work. Birchwood, layered and CNC-milled into the piano's rimless, wave-like body, was chosen for its expressive grain. Each layer moves with the form, giving the surface a depth a flat material could not match. The finishes follow the same logic, with colors chosen to bring the grain forward.

Timbra

Timbra trades the traditional cased silhouette for something rounded and rimless, its birchwood veneer built up in layers until the wood's own grain reads like waves caught mid-motion. Underneath the sculpture is still an instrument: a patented welded steel frame and Sitka spruce soundboard doing the acoustic work, plus self-playing technology built in so the piece can perform on its own.

Timbra now lives at Palma, the restaurant at Santa Monica Proper, installed as a working instrument, the same way Edelweiss pianos have anchored Wearstler's hotel projects for years.