One Hundred Days
There is a standard that governs every piece of lacquerware Hanoia makes, and it has nothing to do with prestige or price. It has to do with time. A single piece - whether it is a tray, a vase, a jewellery box - must pass through more than twenty stages of hand-work before it is finished. Those stages cannot be rushed, because each layer of lacquer must be fully dry before the next can be applied. The drying takes days. The sanding takes days. The painting, the gilding, the polishing - all of it takes days. One hundred of them, at minimum. Often more.
This is what lacquer is: not a surface applied to an object, but a process built into it. The resin comes from trees grown mostly in Phu Tho Province in northern Vietnam - first extracted as a white liquid, thick as condensed milk, then browning in the air, then setting to black. That transformation happens inside the piece, in the dark of a humidity-controlled room, over days in which nothing visible occurs. The change is happening, but you cannot see it.
Rose Morant understood this when she arrived in Binh Duong in 1998. Binh Duong is a province near Ho Chi Minh City that has been one of Vietnam's centres of lacquer since the fourteenth century - a place where the knowledge of the craft had survived long enough to become tradition, and then longer still until it became muscle memory. Morant was a French designer, and she came with a clear idea of what lacquerware could be if it was taken seriously: objects of genuine quality, designed with intention, made by people who knew exactly what they were doing.
She began with six artisans. The workspace was a backyard belonging to a man known as Uncle Tu Lau - bamboo sheets, wooden racks, a simple space. The first commission was two thousand pairs of lacquered sandals. They found buyers in Europe for three seasons running.
What followed, over two decades, was a full reckoning with what the craft could produce. In 2008, the Thien Hong factory opened. By 2013, a second workshop had been established in Ha Thai village, near Hanoi - a craft village devoted to lacquer since the sixteenth century, whose artisans carry the techniques of their great-grandparents in their hands still. It was here that the interior decoration collection took shape: trays, then vases, then boxes, each one built through those same hundred days. Today, Hanoia operates with more than three hundred artisans across workshops in both the north and south of Vietnam, producing objects that have supplied some of Europe's most respected fashion houses alongside building their own collection.
The name Hanoia holds Hanoi inside it - which is to say it holds Vietnam's history inside it. Lacquerware arrived in Vietnam along the ancient trade routes from China, was absorbed, adapted, and made distinctly Vietnamese over a thousand years. What Hanoia does is not a revival. The craft never died here. It is a clarification: a decision that the knowledge deserves a form worthy of it, and that the objects made from it deserve to travel.
"If the design and illustration are the hallmark of the artist alone," one of Hanoia's artisans has said, "lacquer is the collective work of many, and accumulates layers of meticulous small steps."
That sentence describes the work. It also describes the object you hold at the end of it. Everything that was done to make it is still in there, invisible, compressed into a surface that takes light differently from anything else.
The Leopard stocks Hanoia's lacquerware exclusively in Australia.
Hanoia is based in Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. Every piece is hand-made in traditional lacquer workshops by more than three hundred artisans, through a process of more than twenty stages spanning a minimum of one hundred days.