Furniture used to be something people repaired, refinished, and passed down. Now, when a dresser looks dated or a cabinet has picked up a few too many scratches, it can be easier to replace it than to imagine what it could become.
But old furniture has something a new piece can’t buy: soul. The marks, grain, worn edges, and imperfections are part of what give it character, and sometimes they are exactly what makes a second life worth giving.
Most people see an old dresser. And most furniture makeovers begin with a question of color. Jess Sayer, the artist behind Urukehu, seems to begin somewhere else entirely: with the landscape.
Across her work, old wooden furniture becomes a place for mountains, forests, organic shapes, and layers of earthy color. Sometimes she paints directly onto the surface; other times she lets the grain of the wood become part of the design. The result is furniture that feels less decorated than transformed, as though each piece has been given its own landscape.
Sayer’s philosophy is beautifully simple: “The trees inspired it. My hands translated it.”
That idea runs through everything from her mountain pieces to her forest designs, and perhaps explains why her work feels so different from a typical furniture makeover.
Peaceful Peaks
Originally covered in dark reddish-brown stain and black hardware, the seven-drawer piece had all the characteristics of furniture that could easily have been given a fresh coat of paint and called finished. Instead, Sayer turned the entire front into a mountain scene.
She stripped the top to reveal lighter wood, replaced the bulky hardware, and built overlapping mountain ranges across the drawers in white, beige, taupe, and deep brown. The peaks ignore the drawer divisions, continuing from one section into the next and wrapping around the sides.
It is the kind of detail that changes the way you look at the furniture. The drawers are still drawers, but together they have become one continuous landscape.
And mountains are clearly only part of the world Sayer is building.
Heights
In Heights, the same fascination with mountains takes a different form. Natural wood and painted shapes work together, creating layers that feel organic rather than perfectly drawn.
There is an appealing imperfection to Sayer’s landscapes. The lines rise and fall naturally, the wood grain remains visible, and nothing feels as though it was designed to look manufactured.
Her own words capture that connection to nature: “Where wood holds memories of the forest it once was ✨”
That sentiment gives her furniture a quality that goes beyond decoration. The material already has a history; the artwork becomes another chapter.
Stained Mountains
The Stained Mountains piece makes that relationship with wood even more apparent. Here, the mountain forms seem to grow out of the timber, with the natural grain adding its own movement and texture to the landscape.
Sayer’s work often feels as though it is discovered as much as designed. She has described one piece this way: “This piece kind of found its own direction.” She began with the mountains, deepened the tones, and watched the whole scene gradually shift toward night.
That willingness to follow the material rather than force it into a predetermined result is part of what makes her pieces so distinctive.
“When the sun disappears the mountains belong to the moon 🌙.”
Forever Forest
The mountains eventually give way to trees in Forever Forest, where Sayer turns the wood itself into a kind of forest floor, filling it with rows of organic tree silhouettes.
It is a fitting evolution of her work. Wood carries the memory of trees, and she uses that same material to create another forest across its surface.
She has even made adhesive masks based on the tree lines she uses in her own wood-dyed pieces, inviting others to bring some of that language to their own furniture and timber.
I wanted to make it possible for you to get a little bit of the URUKEHU look on your own furniture 🌿.
There is something generous about that instinct. Her work is unmistakably her own, but she is also opening the door for other people to experiment with the same idea: look at an old piece differently, find the landscape inside it, and give it another life.
And perhaps that is the quiet beauty behind all of these pieces.
The world is noisy. Your home doesn’t have to be.
Sayer has built a creative life around making, experimenting, and turning ideas into something tangible. As she puts it, “This isn’t my dream job… it’s my dream life.”
Looking at these pieces, it is easy to understand why.
