Word: woode
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...industry that brought immense prosperity to Manzano and 10 small burgs around it over the past half-century. Known as the "chair triangle" (il triangolo della sedia), this district every year produces as many as 40 million chairs of all shapes and sizes--typically of beech and oak wood--for offices, homes, hotels, cruise ships, hospitals and restaurants around the world. Locals like to boast that the district in its heyday made 1 of every 3 chairs sold. The demand provided ample work for a tight-knit network of 1,100 highly specialized small firms. And it transformed a once...
Manzano's once dominant share of the market for no-frills office swivel chairs has collapsed because Chinese producers churn them out with almost the same quality at a fraction of the cost. Now the Chinese are stepping up to more sophisticated chairs in wood and leather too. Talk about "the crisis" is ubiquitous in Manzano--even the executives of thriving companies are worried that the unique industrial fabric of the area is fraying. "We see people with tears in their eyes, not knowing what to do next," says Simone Focacci, manager of one of Manzano's three principal banks...
...museum of history in Hong Kong last month, you could visit an exhibition whose centerpiece was a old, bleached, shaped piece of wood, 11 m long. To be honest, it didn't look much. But it told a tale. For the wood was a rudder post from a huge Chinese junk built around the time, nearly 600 years ago, when the Chinese Muslim eunuch admiral Zheng He embarked on seven epic voyages that took him to southeast Asia and the shores of India, Arabia, and Africa, trading for spices and fabrics, livestock and raw materials...
...Ciprianis, the Venetian family that owns namesake hotels and restaurants around the world. Factories in China are capable of producing furniture for those kinds of venues, he says, but they need supervision. "Today I still have to specify what kind of glue, how many screws, what percentage of the wood's pores should be exposed by the lacquer," he says. But in the future, he predicts, China will not only nail the details on imported designs but also start to dream up its own. "Until a few years ago, China produced only 1,000 product designers a year," he says...
When the apocalypse arrives, at least he'll be comfortable. Patterson spends most of the year in Palm Beach, three blocks from a world-class golf course. His backyard is the Intracoastal Waterway. Sitting in his airy, wood-paneled office, surrounded by about a dozen neat stacks of paper representing works in progress, he's amiable, chatty and deeply unpretentious--he refers to his writing as "scribbling." But it's at least a bit of a con--he's read practically everything, and he gets a sly kick out of reminding you of that. He references both Ibsen and Crichton...