Yasar Demir is a craftsman who found his craft by chance and quickly got drawn into it.
In 1998, he was around twelve when, wandering in the backstreets of Istanbul’s crowded neighbourhood Bagcılar, he spotted a small workshop and thought, “Why not?”.
What began as a way to help his family, became a life’s work. Twenty-eight years later, Yasar hasn’t changed track. “I’ve never taken a break” he says simply. “I’ve been working in the same field ever since.”
He started in a modest varnish workshop: the process that turns raw furniture into something shiny and complete. After completing his military service, he started working for larger companies, sharpening his eye and his hand. In 2011, he arrived at Parla and has been here for fifteen years now.
He says, “We blinked, and suddenly fifteen years have passed.”
Yasar Usta is one of the few, who, in those fifteen years, had a chance to step outside the factory floor and represent Parla in different corners of the world during project installations.
He has been to Dubai, Abu Dhabi, Moscow, Sochi, Yalta, Belarus, Albania and Armenia. He names one of his longest trips as the one in Dubai which was for 85 days. Another one was four and a half months spent in Belarus, where he had to climb twenty-five floors of a hotel under renovation every single day, because the elevator was always broken.
Nowadays, as he reminisces, he mostly laughs about it.
Another story he tells most fondly is about a bat. In Sochi, working alone in a dark villa, he reached into a gap in a door frame when fixing it, and felt something soft and warm. He looked up. A large bat, inches from his face. “I was very shaken,” he admits. “After that, I was very careful going into rooms”.
Back at the factory, Yasar’s workspace is a unique one: the most visually distinctive corner of the entire floor, but also relatively hidden away. Where other sections hum with wood and metal and fabric, his area is peaceful and alive with colour. You can easily witness panels drying side by side in deep blues, warm terracottas, and soft greens.
He describes this process as “doing makeup for furniture”; it is a statement that sounds simple but holds great meaning. A piece becomes itself with the right “finish”. It is also the step where craft becomes design, and design becomes something someone will live with for decades.
Yaşar has been part of transforming pieces for fifteen years. And if you ask him whether he enjoys the work his immediate answer is: “I love what I do. You have to love it for the work to come out right.”
