Bodega Design is a Costa Rican design studio led by Alonso Herrera and Ann Alfaro, specializing in contemporary furniture and interior design. The studio combines local production, material exploration, and a playful, colorful identity to create functional objects with character. Bodega aims to contribute to a distinctive Latin American design culture and bring it to new international platforms.

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First of all, it’s an honor for a small studio with a big heart to have a space to share our story. We hope our experience can contribute to the design community and, above all, inspire others to trust their ideas and pursue their own visions.

Bodega grew out of a very personal curiosity of its founder, Alonso Herrera. After graduating from architecture school, he realized that what truly interested him wasn’t large buildings but what happened inside them: the objects, the furniture, and the way they shape atmospheres and transform our everyday experience. He began experimenting by making his first pieces of furniture in a small storage room at home. That space, originally meant for keeping things, became his first workshop and ultimately gave the studio its name.

Our DOT console is a good example of how we approach design today. It started with an everyday need: storage. It’s one of the most common requests that we hear from our clients, but we didn’t want to solve it by simply creating another piece of furniture to store things. We wanted to develop a system that could adapt to different spaces while still having a recognizable identity.

The answer came through exploring sheet metal. After studying the possibilities of laser cutting and metal bending, we developed a modular system that can grow according to the needs of each space and be customized with color. The circular perforations on the doors—the dots that give the piece its name—started as a minimal gesture but ultimately came to define the character of the entire piece.

DOT captures something we constantly pursue at Bodega: saying a lot with very little. We love solving everyday needs with objects that are simple, functional, and distinctive enough to become part of the atmosphere of a space.

Bodega Design is led by Alonso Herrera and Ann Alfaro. Although they have different professional backgrounds, they’ve come together very naturally within the studio.

Alonso is an architect. From early on in his training, he became interested in how we experience life through the material world: how things are made, how we inhabit spaces, and how a design decision can transform our perception, behavior, and even our emotions. This foundation was essential in shaping his role as Bodega’s design director. After more than twelve years designing furniture, he still approaches the practice with the curiosity of someone who feels there is always more to discover. He considers himself a design geek: constantly studying, sketching, and testing. His computer holds thousands of iterations of objects that may never exist, but they are all part of that ongoing exploration. Design is his greatest talent and also his purpose.

Ann is a communications professional, art director, and audiovisual producer. Her background brought a different perspective to the studio: the understanding that an object’s story doesn’t end when it leaves the workshop but continues through how it is presented, photographed, communicated, and ultimately connects with people. Her role has been to translate Bodega’s design language into a recognizable visual identity, preserving the alternative, colorful, and genuine character that defines the brand. Over the years, our disciplines have become increasingly intertwined, and today, decisions about products, spaces, imagery, and communication are all part of the same creative conversation.

Beyond being business partners, Alonso and Ann are also a couple. We fell in love before ever imagining that one day we would build a design studio together. Today, we share a vision: to bring Costa Rican design to new stages, contribute to building a stronger design culture in a country where there is still so much territory to explore, and create spaces where knowledge can be shared.

In the end, our motivation remains quite simple: we love imagining beautiful things, figuring out how to bring them to life in our own workshop, and then seeing them become part of other people’s lives. Being able to do this locally, alongside craftspeople, makers, designers, and a community that values what is made in Costa Rica, is probably what gives Bodega its deepest sense of purpose.

At Bodega, we’ve learned to see constraints as part of the design process. Because we produce everything locally and work with a relatively small workshop, we often design around the technologies and processes available to us, while trying to push them a little further with each project.

With DOT, one of the main constraints was technology. We wanted to develop a fully metal storage system that was modular and precise but could also be produced efficiently with the resources available to us. This led us to explore two processes we had already been working with: laser cutting and sheet metal bending.

Rather than trying to hide those constraints, we decided to make them part of the product’s language. Each component was designed around how it could be cut, bent, and assembled as simply as possible. Even the circular perforations on the doors came from this search for a minimal gesture that could take advantage of the manufacturing process.

In the end, the constraint made DOT simpler and more coherent. It pushed us to remove unnecessary elements and find identity within the logic of its construction. For us, that is one of the most interesting aspects of design: when the way an object is made isn’t something you figure out afterward but an essential part of its form.

One decision we have stood by from the beginning has been using metal as one of Bodega’s main material languages.

Costa Rica has a rich tradition of woodworking. It’s a material we love and continue to use, and we also have great respect for the knowledge developed over generations by local craftspeople, designers, and families who specialize in working with wood. Rather than trying to replicate a language that already had a strong history of its own, we wanted to explore a less developed territory within the local furniture scene: metal.

At first, it wasn’t an easy decision. There was some resistance toward accepting metal as a material for residential furniture. It can be perceived as cold, industrial, or less valuable than wood. We saw exactly the opposite. We found it to be an incredibly versatile, precise, and durable material. It also has the ability to bend, transform, and—most importantly—embrace color in a way that naturally connects with our identity.

For years, we have stood by that decision, even when taking a more familiar path might have been easier. Over time, we have also seen our community’s perception shift as well as a growing interest in more contemporary and experimental approaches to furniture.

Today, metal is part of Bodega’s DNA. We want to keep exploring it not only as a construction material but also as a design language, discovering how far we can push it and how we can transform it into objects that are functional, expressive, and made to last.

Although DOT looks like a very simple object, achieving that simplicity involved a lot of testing and many decisions about what should stay and what should go.

An important part of the process was finding the right proportions. We tested different dimensions and heights until we reached a scale that felt functional while remaining visually different from a conventional console. Prototyping was essential to understanding the object in a real space. Some decisions about proportion simply can’t be made on a screen.

We explored different perforation patterns for the doors. Moreover, we even developed versions with acrylic panels in the doors, but we decided to remove them because the material didn’t align with our focus on durability and longevity. In the end, we chose the circle for the clarity of its geometry and because such a simple gesture gave the piece a strong identity without adding visual noise.

The final design is, in many ways, the result of everything we removed. DOT may look simple, but that simplicity wasn’t the starting point; it was the result of many iterations until only the essential remained.

Building a career around furniture design while also turning it into a sustainable business in Costa Rica has brought many moments of uncertainty. We’ve faced particularly challenging projects, economic shifts, a pandemic, and all the external factors that inevitably affect a small studio.

Interestingly, our biggest doubts have never been about design. That’s where we feel confident: we have the knowledge, the curiosity, and—above all—a strong desire to keep creating. The harder questions have always been about the business: how to grow without losing our identity, how to sustain local production, how to create jobs, and how to keep investing in a niche industry within a small market.

What has allowed us to keep going is constantly returning to our initial purpose, trusting our vision, learning from what we don’t know, and surrounding ourselves with people who bring different knowledge and skills to the table. The community that has grown around Bodega has also been essential. Knowing that there are people who value what we do reminds us that there is a place for our way of understanding design.

With DOT, however, there was never a moment when we questioned whether the product should exist. We knew that reaching the right version would require research, prototypes, and mistakes along the way. For us, doubt is part of the design process; what matters is not letting it become a reason to stop creating.

Our main source of inspiration is still the tangible world. We consume a lot of design through digital media, but for us, nothing replaces experiencing an object or a space in person. We love traveling, visiting design fairs, exhibitions, museums, and studios, meeting other creatives, and experiencing their work through the senses: seeing the real proportions, touching the materials, understanding how things are made, and noticing how they make us feel when we are actually standing in front of them.

When we hit a creative block, the answer is often not to keep searching for references on a screen but to step away from it. Traveling, visiting an exhibition, or simply having a conversation with other designers usually brings our curiosity back. We believe that if you want to design objects that will exist in the real world, you need to stay connected to the real world.

And when we need to remember why we started, surprisingly, we don’t always look to other designers. Sometimes we look back. Seeing the first pieces we made, remembering that small workshop, and comparing it to everything we have managed to build gives us a lot of energy to keep going. We also find inspiration in our fellow Costa Rican designers. There is a special sense of empathy among those of us trying to develop design in a small country with an emerging industry and limited resources. We support one another, share knowledge, and try to create opportunities for Costa Rican design to grow collectively.

Of course, there are studios whose work we follow closely. We admire Muller Van Severen for their sensitivity to materials and the clarity with which they allow them to become protagonists of an object; Supaform for the freedom with which they explore furniture, color, geometry, and more experimental visual worlds; and Mestiz (Mexico) for a practice deeply connected to craftsmanship, color, and a strong sense of identity. We also follow the work of GZ Space as part of our ongoing interest in contemporary studios that expand the way we think about design.

Ultimately, we don’t look at others to find something to reproduce but to remind ourselves that design can have many different voices. That encourages us to keep building our own work from Costa Rica.

Our vision is for Bodega to continue growing into a relevant Latin American studio within contemporary design. We want to keep creating objects and also contribute knowledge, research, and new possibilities to the local design industry. Over the years, we have developed a deeper understanding of materials and manufacturing processes, and we want to keep pushing them into new territories.

Part of that growth also means sharing what we have learned. We keep our doors open to students through our internship program, where we collaborate on the development and exploration of new products. At the same time, we want to continue bringing our work to international exhibitions and platforms—not only to show what we do, but also to bring a Latin American perspective into the global design conversation.

What will remain is our identity. We will continue to embrace color, personality, and a certain sense of joy in the objects we design. We come from a visually rich, expressive culture full of contrasts, and we are interested in bringing some of that Latin American maximalism into dialogue with the simplicity of our forms. We want to create objects that can bring joy to a space, spark an emotion, and improve, even in a small way, people’s everyday experience.

But there is something else we never want to lose: the ability to change. We believe that what isn’t flexible eventually breaks. That’s why we have never wanted to define Bodega simply as a furniture brand. We see it as a platform for design, experimentation, and bringing ideas to life. Today, furniture is our main language, but we don’t want to place limits on what Bodega might become tomorrow.

We want to grow without becoming rigid, maintaining a clear identity while always keeping enough curiosity to evolve.

Joyful Objects, Yes! We love the way they bring together function, color, and a playful approach to everyday objects. Their work is a great example of how practical pieces can still have personality, spark curiosity, and bring a sense of joy into a space.

Alonso: My Teenage Engineering K.O. II synthesizer.

Ann: A high-quality office chair.

Alonso: Electronic music. Film: 2001: A Space Odyssey. Album: Valentín Alsina by 2 Minutos.

Ann: Book: The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron. Film: 2001: A Space Odyssey. Album: Debut by Björk.

Alonso: Drinking mate in the morning, cold showers, and yoga.

Ann: Walking our dog, Rayo.

Alonso: An electronic music synthesizer.

Ann: The Side Table Ashtray by Houseplant.

Alonso: Embrace the process with patience and wisdom. Consistency can lead to wonderful results.

Ann: Explore as many iterations as possible until you find the best solution.

Alonso: No coffee, just mate.

Ann: Cappuccino with oat milk.

Form & Function is a print magazine about the objects worth keeping. We write about the tools, gear, and everyday things that earn their place through good design and honest craft — the stuff that works as well as it looks. Each issue is made slowly and on purpose: matte pages, considered writing, no filler. This newsletter is where that same thinking shows up between issues — founder interviews, early looks, and the occasional thing we can't stop thinking about.

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The quarterly print magazine about things worth keeping. Matte, printed, made to be held. Ships August ‘26.