THE VISION
Edelweiss, uniquely, and unlike any other piano maker, have focused exclusively on developing pianos for the home: instruments which harmonise, beautify, and refresh the space we move and live in every day. Our mission? to change the way people think about the piano and its place in the home.
All our pianos are handbuilt in Britain, assembled from parts that are sourced both locally and from around the world. During the Covid Lockdown we became concerned about the length of our supply chain and considered how attractive it would be if we could source everything much closer to home. But this would be no easy challenge: the essential parts that we needed had not been manufactured in Britain for decades – what a century ago had been a booming British industry had basically disappeared, mostly to the eastern part of the globe, and the remains of the industry repurposed into other areas.
So, was it even possible that we would be able to fulfil this vision?
We realised that if we were to succeed, we would need to start from the ground up, firstly designing each part, then creating the manufacturing process, and finally assembling it all together to create what would have to be a truly excellent piano.
We considered ourselves to be in quite a fortunate position: in 1720 Bartolomeo Cristofori is credited with inventing the first ‘piano’, and here we were, just over 300 years later with all those centuries of experience and learning to gain from; if we could combine all this with the technological advancements of the 21st century we felt we should be able to create something very special.
THEORY
It seems that almost every so called ‘small’ grand piano is in fact a ‘short’ grand piano; in other words, the designers have taken an excellent large grand piano and scaled it down to make it smaller. The piano still has many of the features that are so effective in a large grand piano with higher tensions, stiffer and more rigid soundboard structures, heavier hammers etc but with everything shortened so that it produces less volume and a shallower tone.
We wanted to redesign the piano from the bottom up, believing that you will achieve a more beautiful sound by creating a lighter and more flexible soundboard structure with a slightly reduced string tension, opting for a piano that could ‘sing’ with a greater tonal purity than just opting for raw power and muscle. When building a piano for someone’s home we figured there is little point in prioritising volume and power without including the ability for the pianist to control both.
We also wanted the piano to be beautifully complimentary to every interior without having a large and intimidating impact on a room, we describe this as having a low spatial presence.
