BEHIND CLOSED DOORS LONELY MOUNTAIN SKIS

JAMIE KUNKA’S HANDMADE WOODEN SKIS OFFER BEAUTY, SUSTAINABILITY AND HIGH PERFORMANCE IN EQUAL MEASURE

- Catherine Coyle

Charles and Ray Eames would be proud. The American design dream team who experimented with wood, bending and sculpting it into new forms for their furniture, couldn’t have imagined that an Aberdonian student’s final university project would be inspired by their pioneering work – or that it would lead to a rather niche cottage industry that’s putting the little Perthshire village of Birnam on the map.

Jamie Kunka studied product design at Dundee University but he reckons it was his childhood love for Lego and messing about with K’nex (a toy for older kids, where plastic rods can be connected to make new structures) that steered him along the path towards making high-performance and beautiful wooden skis. By the time he was a young teenager, he’d picked up woodworking tools and was making all sorts – including longbows. “I’d seen Ray Mears make a pair of skis from a fallen pine tree in the forest, with a Swedish maker,” laughs Kunka. “And making longbows taught me a lot about the bendy and springy properties of wood, which was really useful when I started making skis.”