Commune began as an extension of Koda, the Singapore family manufacturer that spent decades producing furniture for global brands. That factory-floor legacy now shapes Julian Koh’s approach to design, from material choices to furniture made for contemporary Asian homes. As Commune grows, the brand is looking beyond the showroom to build a wider ecosystem for homeowners, designers and interiors partners.Long before Commune entered Singapore’s design vocabulary, there was Koda: a family enterprise shaped by timber, risk and the resilience of post-independence Asian manufacturing. Julian Koh’s grandfather, Koh Teng Kwee, was a design and technology teacher before trading the classroom for a small woodcraft workshop in Punggol. The family’s roots reach further back, to Wenzhou in China’s Zhejiang province, where an earlier generation had worked in furniture retail before looking south for a different future.
Koda’s early factory floor, where the family business produced woodcraft pieces before growing into a regional furniture manufacturer. (Photo: Commune)
Koda’s first offerings were modest but exacting: jewellery boxes for Japanese clients, then speaker cabinets and, eventually, furniture. A folding director’s chair became an early calling card, taking the company from the humidity and sawdust of the workshop floor to international trade fairs, where foreign buyers began to recognise the discipline behind the craft.The business faced its first serious test almost as soon as it began to grow. A fire gutted the factory in the mid-1970s, forcing a rebuild that would become part of the company’s institutional memory. By the 1980s, Julian’s father had joined, and Koda was manufacturing at scale, including for Ikea from around 1985. Those years delivered an unsentimental education in knock-down construction, export discipline and the quiet rigour that global retail demands.
