Why this exists
A house called voice.
Stemme is Danish, and it means three things at once: voice, to tune, and to vote. All three are literally what these objects do.
Pronounced "STEM-uh" in Danish. We accept "stem" in English.
The name
They carry voices. They are tuned by hand. And one of them has a button that lets a listener answer back.
The products are named for the Muses. Muse is the kitchen radio, Clio the bedside radio, and Calliope the story player — Calliope was the muse of epic poetry, the one who presided over storytelling, and the eldest of the nine.
Naming three objects after the Muses is a small promise: that the thing on your counter is for something you make a life out of, not a device with a product cycle.
How it started
With a kitchen, and a speaker that had to be asked. Changing a station meant finding a phone, unlocking it, waiting for an app, and saying a sentence out loud to a company. Meanwhile the radio our grandmother kept on the windowsill for thirty years had a dial, and the dial worked with wet hands.
We could not find anyone still making that object honestly — solid wood, no screen, repairable, not listening. So we made three.
What we decided not to do
No screens anywhere in the line. No accounts. No microphone in any product except the talkback button on Muse and Clio, which is momentary, obvious, and does nothing until it is pressed. No subscription, now or later. No branding on the face of an object that will sit in someone's home for decades.
And no claims we cannot stand behind. Calliope is a product about a voice outlasting the person who has it, which is enough on its own.
Where we are
A small shop, a first run of 330 objects across three products, and a waitlist rather than a shop counter. When a run is ready we write to the list once, and you choose a species.