"If you were to rise before dawn on Christmas Eve, and walk down the empty Hackney Rd past the dark shopfronts in the early morning, you would very likely see a mysterious glow emanating from the workshop at the rear of number forty-five where spindles for staircases are made. If you were to stop and press your face against the glass, peering further into the depths of the gloom, you would see a shower of wood chips flying magically into the air, illuminated by a single light, and falling like snow into the shadowy interior of the workshop where wood turner Maurice Franklin, who was born upstairs above the shop in 1920, has been working at his lathe since 1933 when he began his apprenticeship."

"Handcrafted wooden toys of recently extinct animals. I selected these four creatures for their beautiful shapes and patterns. Choosing an anthropomorphic approach, I designed them with simplified, humanistic shapes and statures. Once unfolded, the packaging becomes an information graphic about the animal inside. These toys are meant to incite wonder and interest in creatures that existed only a short while ago." Beautiful.

"70 year-old Buddhist monk Hua Chi has been praying in the same spot at his temple in Tongren, China for over 20 years. His footprints, which are up to 1.2 inches deep in some areas, are the result of performing his prayers up to 3000 times a day. Now that he is 70, he says that he has greatly reduced his quantity of prayers to 1,000 times each day."

Just so beautiful. Now: I just need a video of it rotating on loop, please.

"a tiny camera gathers light and shape data, before sending it to a computer that processes it and uses hundreds of tiny electric motors to shift the wood blocks into the image in front of the device. Subtle gradations of shade are achieved by both the natural grain of the wood and the angle at which they are displayed, casting shadow if necessary." Beautiful.

"Dominating the skyline of Arkhangelsk, a city in Russia's far north-west, it is believed to be the world's tallest wooden house, soaring 13 floors to reach 144ft - about half the size of the tower of Big Ben." Wow.