A child drawing on the rug of a lived-in living room. A bookcase built from wall to wall fills the wall behind.

Our mission

Everyone deserves a beautiful, functional and affordable home.

Illustration

Home is where we spend most of our lives.

It is where we grow up. It holds some of our best moments, and some of our hardest.

  • A toddler walking across a rug towards a parent’s outstretched hands.
    First steps
  • A child in pyjamas at a sunny kitchen table with pancakes while someone pours coffee.
    Sunday breakfast
  • A child bent over an exercise book under a lamp, a parent’s hand pointing at the page.
    Homework at the kitchen table
  • A hand marking a child’s height in pencil on a door frame covered in older marks.
    Height marks on the door frame
  • Friends laughing around a table late at night, candles burned low.
    Friends who stay too late
  • A couple eating takeaway on the floor of an empty room among moving boxes.
    The first night in a new place
  • Someone wrapped in a blanket on a window seat, watching the rain at dusk.
    The quiet after a hard day

A good home gives you peace. It takes complexity out of your day and leaves room for what matters.

And it has been getting harder to have one.

How we used to build

We used to build beautifully. For everyone.

A high-ceilinged room in an old apartment with an ornate plaster cornice, panelled double doors standing open, herringbone parquet and a wooden cupboard built into the wall.
Illustration

Walk into an old apartment in Berlin, Vienna, Paris or London. Plaster ceilings, panelled doors, moulded skirting, cupboards built into the walls. These weren’t palaces. Many were homes for ordinary families, made by skilled hands that people could afford.

Have nothing in your houses that you do not know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful.
William Morris, “The Beauty of Life”, 1880

What happened

Then craftsmanship became a luxury.

Since 1966, joinery in Germany has become ten times as expensive. Prices overall rose less than five times.

025050075010001966198020002025×10.4Joinery×4.7All prices
Price of joinery work on homes and of consumer prices in Germany, both set to 100 in 1966. West Germany until 1990. [1] [2]

What machines make got cheaper. What hands make got dearer.

  • TVs and audio−73%
  • Furniture+39%
  • All prices+59%
  • Work on your home+103%
Change in EU consumer prices, 2005 to 2025. “Work on your home” is paid repair and maintenance of the home. [3]

Where we are

So homes became flat, basic and cheap. And technology an afterthought.

The same apartment stripped of its detail: a flat ceiling, plain doors, grey laminate and white flat-pack furniture, with an air purifier, a router, a robot vacuum and a tangle of cables standing around.Illustration

Flat doors, white boxes, the same in every flat, because the cheapest thing to make wins. And everything that plugs in stands around it, as more boxes with more cables.

What we’re doing

Beautiful craftsmanship is coming back.

Cheaper. Faster. Smarter.

Cheaper.

A machine charges for time and material, not for hand hours. To a machine, a moulding, a panel or a curve is just a different path for the same cut. So detail stops being a luxury.

A flat, unmachined oak slab lying on the bed of a CNC machine.The same oak door after machining, with two raised panels framed by fine mouldings.Illustration
Same board. Same machine. A different path.

Faster.

A home shouldn’t take a year of your life. Months of dust, decisions and waiting for the next tradesperson wear people out. In one study, people who described their homes as cluttered or unfinished had less healthy stress-hormone patterns through the day. [9]

Designed in an afternoon, made in days, fitted in one go.

The usual way

  1. Measure
  2. Design
  3. Quote
  4. Wait
  5. Make
  6. Fit

Ten weeks of booked work before a joiner can even start. [5]

What we’re building

  1. Design
  2. Make
  3. Fit

Days, not months. Our aim, not yet a promise.

Smarter.

Power, light and cables planned in from the first drawing. Speakers, chargers and air purifiers live inside the woodwork instead of standing around it, and every cupboard is built for what goes in it.

The same living room with built-in oak shelves and cupboards fitted into the alcove, a media unit along the wall and a bench under the window.A living room furnished with a short freestanding bookcase, a TV bench, a chest of drawers and boxes stacked in the alcove.FurnishedDesignedIllustration
The same room, furnished and designed. Drag to compare.

How we get there

The Caminu Masterplan.

  1. Step 1Smarter

    Give everyone an agent that designs wooden interiors like a master carpenter

    Hands at a kitchen table with a laptop showing a bookcase model, a tape measure and a sketch. Tape on the wall behind marks where the shelves will go.
    Illustration

    Good carpentry is not a table you put in a room. It is built into the home: the wall of shelves around the door, the wardrobe under the slope, the bench in the hall with storage inside. It is what makes a home work, and until now it took a carpenter to design it.

    Describe the space and what you need from it. The agent designs it the way a carpenter would, to the millimetre, with power, light and cables planned in from the first drawing. You get a 3D model, a cut list and a guide to build it, down to every panel, hole and fitting, which is also exactly what a machine needs to make it. This is what early access is.

  2. Step 2Cheaper

    Build autonomous factories that deliver custom woodwork fast and at low cost

    A CNC machine cutting furniture panels from a sheet of plywood while a robot arm stacks the finished parts on a pallet.
    Illustration

    Not everyone owns a saw. Use the designs from step 1 to run factories that cut, drill and pack one piece at a time, with nobody redrawing it and no set-up between jobs. We are working on the first part now: delivering the parts for your design, cut and ready to assemble.

    When a one-off costs a machine no more than the thousandth copy, made to measure stops being a luxury, and so does detail. Custom at the price of standard, and at your door fast.

  3. Step 3Faster

    Build a robotic workforce that does the carpenter’s work on site

    Two small robot arms on wheeled bases fitting a built-in bookcase into an alcove, with dust sheets on the floor and plywood panels stacked against the wall.
    Illustration

    A design and a stack of parts are not a finished room. Walls are never straight and floors are never level, so someone has to carry it in, scribe it, fit it and fix it. Today that takes a skilled carpenter on site, booked weeks ahead.

    Use the designs from step 1 and the parts from step 2 to teach robots that last stretch, in real homes. This is the hardest of the three and the furthest away. If we get there, a home fitted the way a carpenter would fit it takes days instead of months, and everyone can afford it.

Where it leads

A home on autopilot.

A small room with a wall of built-in oak joinery and a desk with a laptop and lamp.The same room with the desk folded away and a made double bed folded down from the joinery, reading lights on.
Illustration
A small office by day. A guest room at the press of a button.

Design the home as one system, with the technology inside the woodwork from the start, and it can begin to run itself.

It knows where everything is stored and opens the right drawer or door. It brings things to you, so nobody climbs a ladder for the box at the back of a three-metre wardrobe, the way logistics hubs bring the shelves to the people.

A small household robot putting a folded blanket away in a fitted storage wall, in a calm living room at dusk.
Illustration

It has to be custom, because every home and what its people need from it are different. A robot cannot put things away in a house that has no place for them.

Sources

  1. Statistisches Bundesamt (Destatis), GENESIS-Online table 61261-0001, construction price indices: joinery work (Tischlerarbeiten) on residential buildings, including VAT, annual averages. Until 1990 the figures cover the former West Germany. Read the source
  2. Destatis, consumer price index for Germany from 1991 (GENESIS-Online table 61111-0001), and the cost-of-living index for all private households in West Germany before that (Verbraucherpreisindizes für Deutschland – Lange Reihen ab 1948, February 2019). We joined the two in 1991 and set both lines to 100 in 1966; that join is our own calculation. Read the source
  3. Eurostat, harmonised index of consumer prices, annual averages (prc_hicp_aind), EU-27, 2005 and 2025: equipment for sound and pictures (CP0911), furniture and furnishings (CP0511), all items (CP00), and services for the maintenance and repair of the dwelling (CP0432). Read the source
  4. Which? (2025), “How much do fitted wardrobes cost?”. UK prices including VAT, from a November 2025 survey of nine Which? Trusted Traders and four retailers. Read the source
  5. Zentralverband des Deutschen Handwerks (May 2026), Konjunkturbericht 1/2026. Weeks of orders in hand in the finishing trades (joiners, electricians, plumbers, painters and others), which ZDH describes as the waiting time for customers. Read the source
  6. European Labour Authority (2025), EURES report on labour shortages and surpluses 2024. Twenty-nine countries reported; ten of them list carpenters and joiners as a surplus occupation. Read the source
  7. Eurostat, Comext, “EU trade since 1988 by HS2-4-6 and CN8” (DS-045409), updated September 2026. EU-27 imports from China of furniture other than seats (HS 9403), by weight; 1999 is the first year given for the EU-27. Read the source
  8. European Environmental Bureau and Eunomia (2017), Circular economy opportunities in the furniture sector. The waste figure is an estimate: the report gives a range of 5.75 to 14.4 million tonnes, and its figure for the share burned or buried rests on older industry data. Read the source
  9. Saxbe and Repetti (2010), “No place like home: home tours correlate with daily patterns of mood and cortisol”, Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 36(1), 71–81. Sixty dual-income spouses. Read the source

What would you build if it only had to fit your room?

Show Caminu your room and describe the piece. You get the 3D model, the cut list and the assembly guide.

Start designingSee pricing