A city map is easy to recognise and surprisingly difficult to design.
Too much information and it becomes visual noise. Too little and the city loses its character. Then add wood, layering, cutting tolerances, framing and customisation, and what looked like a simple idea becomes a fairly complex product to build.
That was the interesting part for me.
I have always been drawn to cartography, but this was the first time I started looking at maps as something beyond information. Roads could become linework. Density could become texture. A familiar city could become an object with depth, material and presence.
The first challenge was learning how to design the maps themselves. Which roads stay, which disappear, how much of the city should be shown, and how do you simplify it without making every city look the same?
We also decided early that we wanted to build the entire product ourselves. The artwork, wood cutting, layering, assembly and frame options all had to work as one system. There was very little room for approximation. If one layer moved slightly, or a road became too fine, the finished piece changed.
But the bigger breakthrough came from understanding that people do not really buy maps because they like maps.
They buy places.
A city can be where someone grew up, studied, met a partner, built a career or simply spent a period of life they want to remember. Once we understood that, offering only a fixed list of cities felt limiting.
Customisation became the real challenge.
It took us a couple of months to work through how someone could choose a location and how we could reliably turn that into a custom wooden city map. That meant solving not just the design, but the entire journey around it: location selection, map preparation, production, accuracy, framing, packaging and logistics.
A few months after launch, the response became much bigger than we had planned for. The maps started travelling quickly, custom requests kept growing, and the collection became one of the strongest new directions for Tohfa Shofa.
What makes that especially exciting is that this still feels like the beginning.
We started with wooden city maps, but the broader idea is much larger: how can places, geography and memory become objects people want to live with?
That is the part we are now interested in exploring further.
