Virovitica is a small town in northern Croatia, near the Drava river and the Hungarian border. The land around it is flat and green, and for as long as anyone remembers, it has been oak country. It was the oak that brought industry to the town, and it was the oak that started Tvin.
1913: a sawmill by the forest
In 1913, French investors built a sawmill in Virovitica to cut the oak that grew all around the town. Logs came in from the forests and left as boards. Within a few years the mill changed hands and grew, and by 1920 a large furniture factory was being built beside it. From then on, the oak could leave Virovitica as furniture, not only as timber.
The first table
After the Second World War, the factory turned to finished furniture. In 1953 it made its first industrially produced table, the Kancel. It was a modest beginning for a company that would go on to furnish offices, schools and homes across the country.
1966: modern design arrives
In the 1960s Tvin began working with Bernardo Bernardi, one of the great names of Croatian modern design. His armchairs and modular furniture systems, clean and practical, were made in Virovitica and furnished some of the landmark offices of Zagreb. It was the moment the factory learned that good design and good making belong under one roof. In 1974 the company took the name it still carries: TVIN, from Tvornica virovitičke industrije namještaja, the Virovitica furniture factory.
Kept alive by its makers
The 1990s were hard years in Croatia, and for industry most of all. Through them, Tvin's own workers became its shareholders and kept the factory running.
2015: a new generation
In 2015 the Vampovac family took over Tvin, and Hrvoje Vampovac leads it today. The factory makes furniture for homes, offices and hotels, and in 2023 it took on a line that sums up where it comes from: "Trees, the dreams are made of."
And then, a table
It was inside this factory that Hrvoje spent eight years on one idea: an oak table that grows in one motion, with no leaves to lift or store. The Accordion Table is made in Virovitica, and more than 40 hours of handwork go into each one. The logs are sawn at Tvin's own mill, the boards are stacked to dry, then chosen by eye and glued into panels, and the lattice is fitted to the mechanism by hand, one slat at a time.
The oak is still Slavonian. And the people at the benches are still doing what people have done at this address since 1913: turning trees into things that last.
