A LTHOUGH the furniture of our Elizabethan and Jacobean periods is very picturesque and sympathetic, it lacks the learnedness of design and expertness of craftsmanship which had already been attained in Italy and France. After the Restoration of 1660 England saw a rapid development of these qualities, and what in the domains of architecture and […]
Category: Design Secrets: Furniture 50 Real-Life Projects Uncovered
Miscella? iea for the Eating-Room
T HE elaborations of civilisation and settled society grew rapidly during the cabriole period, and in no place more than in the dining-room. There had been splendid feasting, with every sort of device for dressing food. But the furniture of the hall or parlour where food was served and the objects for that service had […]
Very interesting piece,” according to Jeffrey Bernett. “In the furniture world, it’s probably the piece that’s closest to sculpture.”
“And doing a chaise is very daunting because you get compared to the very best right off the bat. Eames, le Corbousier, Mies van der Roe, Kierholm—all of them designed iconic chaises.” Bernett has designed two closely related chaise lounges for B&B Italia. “A number of years ago,” he explains, “we did a chaise for […]
Other summer, we’d visit family in Poland,” recalls Jacek Ostoya. “I remember at my aunt’s house in the town of Lublin, on the eastern side of Poland, there was a daybed in their living room.”
“If I wanted to take a nap, I’d be laid down there, while they sat at the table talking. Rooms did double duty because people didn’t have much space. This daybed was multifunctional, working as a couch or converting to a bed. It stuck with me. I liked the idea of furniture doing double duty,” […]
“But I’d been snowboarding a lot, and I’d done skateboard ramps as a kid
We used to split up orange boxes and bang them back together. So, I just remembered what I did as a kid. It was just a natural curve. Nothing else really.” This focus on the simplicity of a solution is not idle modesty, but a central part of Williams’ design philosophy. “I hate having all […]
With materials on hand in the studio,” says Stephanie Forsythe, director and designer at molo design, ltd. “As designers, we like to focus on one material and see all that it can do, rather than impose ourselves on the material.”
In the case of the paper softwall, the initial inspiration was picked up at a dollar store. Working with expandable paper party decorations, Forsythe and her partner, Todd MacAllen, began looking into the expandable properties of tissue paper honeycomb, and the kinds of interesting 3D structures they could create. At the same time, “. . […]
Bookshelves are mostly the domain of Stark ninety-degree angles given over to pure function
There could be no shelving unit that moves further from this paradigm than Three—A Shelving Project that Dominique jakob and Brendan MacFarlane designed for Sawaya & Moroni. “The piece came from an urge to build a completely freestanding shelving unit in space,” says MacFarlane. “The concept for the Three was to make a completely freestanding […]
Client, the end user, to rethink the traditional layout of the ҐООт, and to introduce а СІфЬоЗҐСІ that makes the interior not so rigid and geometrical, but more free and unconventional,”
says Michele De Lucchi. “This is part of a layout process where you design the room in a totally unexpected way.” Unlike traditional shelving units that are invariably shoved up against a wall, Layout shelves are to be pulled out, into the room, where they become sculptural pieces that help define space. “The first idea […]
“There’s these two pulls in the way I design,” says Chris Lehrecke. “One is more the influence of my background in design and studying fUITlitUrC, and the other is the daily routine of building things everyday that I’ve been doing for twenty years.”
In each of these approaches, there are both formal and informal influences. While Lehrecke didn’t attend architecture school, he does have a professional background in both architecture and design and grew up in the house of an architect. And he has been a long-time collector of furniture. Most important, he doesn’t mind getting his hands […]
“Magis asked me to design a shelving system,” says Stefano Giovannoni. “I immediately recognized that a square unit was the best option for modularity. However, I also realized it would be quite difficult to avoid creating something banal.”
“I decided to give the face of the book unit fluidity, a sense of three dimensions, using the same three dimensional form that I created with the Fruitscape design for Alessi,” he says. “I shifted the Fruitscape form from horizontal to vertical, and projected a square grid onto this curved landscape, creating the book unit […]