Siegfried Schröttner bends to examine a large piece of leather. Closing his eyes, he caresses ­ its surface with his hand. Feeling, smelling. Only the best ­full-grain leather treated with organic mine­ral-based tanning agents meets with his approval. If ­Schröttner comes across the slightest flaw – an insect bite or some other barely perceptible impurity – he will cast a piece aside without so much as batting an eyelid. Quality is everything when it comes to fitting a G-Class. Siegfried Schröttner and his colleagues have more than enough to do selecting the materials. Around 22,000 square metres of untreated leather are on hand at designo manufaktur – over 200,000 square metres are handled by their artisans every year. Layers of fine Nappa and Lugano leather, sourced from bulls raised in Central Europe. After passing under the merciless gaze of the quality controller, the leather undergoes a series of tests to assess its tensile strength, shrinkage characteristics, and climatic responsiveness. Only leather that achieves good grades across the board is passed on to the cutting room. There, an array of presses, water-jet cutters, and splitting and skiving machines awaits. Sections of leather are cut to a pattern using precision punching knives that are accurate down to the last millimetre. But the finest work is yet to come – steady hands are now required.

And Anita Rathkolb and Klaudia Eicher have the steadiest hands in the game. Together, the two are masters in the fine art of Indianapolis stitching, using curved upholstery needles to trim interior door handles with leather and hand-finished top-stitching. “Concentration, good eyes and a soft touch are essential,” explains Anita Rathkolb. Many of the sections they work on – such as the elevated passenger grab handles – are all but inaccessible. There isn’t a machine in the world that can top-stitch the inner face of a rounded object. “You have to commit the precise shape of every component to memory,” says Anita Rathkolb. And if that isn’t enough: the G-Class invites owners to make a statement with custom ornamental seams, leather colouring, and tufting. Sophisticated top-stitching sets off the mirrors, head restraints, seats – even the vehicle’s centre console beguiles with fine accents. And all this in a range of colours: saddle brown, silk beige, deep-sea blue. There’s a reason why so many drivers and passengers compare the off-road experience of the G-Class to a luxury lounge. It’s not just the tech­nology. Mercedes-Benz has perfected the fine art of designing exquisite vehicle interiors over the course of seventy years. Bits and bytes simply can’t compete with that kind of experience. Nothing can beat a needle and thread, a hand and a heart.

Thick mechanical belts criss-cross the room to the thrum of mixing vats and the hiss of valves. The filter press and kneading machine have served at the paste mill for over a century. Here, everything is as it once was. Hydropower still drives the machines. This room is like a second home to Dieter Zeus. The miller has been producing porcelain paste for Nymphenburg Porcelain for 37 years – he is one of the few to have been initiated into the secrets of its production. Mixing the special blend of feldspar, quartz, and kaolin is an art form. Kaolin lends porcelain its strength, feldspar its lustre. The exact formula is a closely guarded secret. Once the ground raw kaolin has been cleansed, the quartz and feldspar are ground in drum mills for some 30 hours. The kaolin slurry is then mixed with the milled minerals in a vat and the resulting paste is then pumped into the filter press. In the next step, Zeus must live up to his namesake. Standing beside the filter press, he must use all his strength to depress its lever until the paste emerges in the form of a square cake. While doing so, he must also pay attention to the suppleness and homogeneity of the porcelain paste. “It takes years of experience to develop a feeling for the consistency of the perfect porcelain mass.” And something else: muscle power.

Standing at his forge, Luca Distler studies the ­glowing, 1,200-degree embers intently. Sparks fly, hot slag spits across the workshop. Distler thrusts a pair of tongs bearing a “parcel” of steel weighing 2.5 kilograms into the flames. From this raw mass, the smith will craft his knives. Fire welding is conducted over glowing coals and requires smiths to first produce the material from which a product is formed. Distler’s knives are forged from a special alloy, the nature of which he declines to divulge, comprising three different types of steel.

The parcel – a stack of five layers of steel – must now be heated evenly. As the steel begins to glow, the forge hisses and snarls. Then, Distler folds the hot layers together, as if closing a book. And again. And again. Gripping a heavy hammer in the other hand, he strikes the layered steel several times. Then folds it again before striking it anew. Layer upon layer of steel is forced upon the last as ­Distler toils in the heat, striking and folding the mass again and again to form a blank of 320 layers of finest ­Damascus steel. And the secret to its quality? Tradition. Layering the steel lends the blades both strength and their striking patterning. Each knife is distinctive. Each has its own character.

Knife making is hard work. “It’s akin to lifting weights all day – heavy, glowing dumb balls,” says Distler. “I’m exhausted by nightfall.” And the knives are far from finished. These raw blanks must be forged again and their blades shaped. This is followed by grinding, smoothing, and polishing. The steel must be treated with acid to bring out the pattern. And the surface buffed until it is smoother than a mirror. The grips are carved from desert ironwood and water buffalo horn, or formed from bog oak and ancient mammoth ivory reco­vered from the Russian permafrost. When all this is done, the blades are engraved and adorned with silver rivets and mother-of-pearl inlays. Occasionally customers approach Distler and his partner Florian Pichler with special requests, and the knife-makers have in the past fashioned custom grips decorated with leopard heads or nudes.

Some knives are made in two days, on others the two perfectionists might work for up to 300 hours. It is a passion that borders on the insane. But perhaps that’s what it takes to make a knife that is both breathtakingly beautiful and so sharp that you could quite literally split hairs with its blade.

Building a concert piano is a complex undertaking. The first challenge is to select a suitable piece of wood from which to craft the soundboard – the soul of the instrument. C. Bechstein uses only mountain spruce grown at elevations above 1,000 metres for this purpose. Many other components are crafted from maple, beech or mahogany. A concert piano consists of around 20,000 individual parts – from back posts to casing walls to keys and hammers to the playing mechanism and frame – and the construction of a single piano can take up to a whole year. The role of piano-maker Katrin Schmidt in this undertaking is a particularly meticulous one: Schmidt must tune and intonate the instrument’s 230 strings. Her task is made all the more difficult by the piano’s steel strings, which lose their tension frequently until the piano has matured. And what’s more, young pianos are sensitive to the slightest changes in temperature and humidity. Her work is a tightrope act, akin to making music from a horde of children humming wildly different tunes.

To achieve her goal, she must re-tune the instrument again and again, tightening and stretching its strings. All 230 strings must be tuned at least four times. Applying a tuning lever to each of the piano’s tuning pins, Schmidt must carefully adjust the strings to their proper tension – a task that requires the utmost patience and a fine ear. A tuning metre is used to set the concert pitch – after that, Ms Schmidt must be all ears. “Mastering the process,” she explains, “takes a lot of practice. When I began my apprenticeship I spent three hours every day doing just one thing: tuning, tuning, tuning.”

Next up: the hammer heads. These are the little “mallets” that actually strike the piano strings. It is vital that they are properly fitted. Deviations of a tenth of a millimetre in their angulation, spacing, or height can detract considerably from the tonality of a concert piano. Following this, Schmidt attends to the piano’s intonation, adjusting the hammers repeatedly until the instrument finds its true voice. Each of the piano’s eighty-eight Australian merino wool-tipped hammer heads must be tuned for this. To do so, Schmidt pricks at the felt-tipped heads with an intonation needle, altering their shape, density and elasticity until their timbre and volume are in perfect harmony. An art form, intonation is all but inexplicable. Each and every hammer head has its own inner life and character. “You have to sense it,” Katrin Schmidt remarks on what is perhaps the most sacred moment in the construction of a concert piano. To give a piano its proper voice is to breathe life into the instrument. A craft and a calling of its own. And a feast for the ears