What brought Deam to that particular moment was his wife’s pregnancy with twins, which necessitated “the requisite pilgrimage to the baby furniture store.” Deam found it intensely intriguing that such a lovely and comforting movement came in such an ugly package. “What I didn’t like was that the way the chair worked was not evident,” […]
Category: Design Secrets: Furniture 50 Real-Life Projects Uncovered
Gone so much out of design,” says Tom Dixon. “Most designers are not involved in the manufacturing at all. They do something on the screen, S0ni60n6 else cleans up the drawing
then someone else does the model and it gets sent to a manufacturing facility. This project was multidimensional.” The Fresh Fat Chair—and the table and bowls—collapse all these steps into a single, spontaneous piece of design performance art. Dixon subverts the industrial process of plastic extrusion by taking the hot polymer strands as they come […]
Think of materials and what they can do for us. We think that materials are for one kind of thing,” says industrial designer Satyendra Pakhale, speaking of his Flower Offering Chair. “You never think of ceramic and a chair.”
Pakhale got his chance to find out what ceramics are capable of— and to push the material into new territory—when he was invited to a residency at the European Ceramic Work Centre (EKWC) in the Netherlands. The centre offers artists, architects, and designers the opportunity to live and work on site for three-month stints, where […]
It was a joke. An email arrived that said simply, НЄІІО, we are Seglas. We have seen you on the Internet and would like you to design a chair for us. 3,000 chairs, please. Looking forward to hearing from you.”
Assuming this was just a tease from a colleague or friend, Forster laughed and forgot about the note. Then, a few months later, she received another email from this mysterious Seglas. This time, it was an electronic holiday card. Forster took a moment to look at the recipient list and noticed her name appeared among […]
The machine to make a kind of clothes for the sofa,” says Erwan Bouroullec of the Facett collection. “It’s a bridge between clothing and origami paper folding.”
The machine to which he is referring was something he and his brother, Ronan, discovered on the factory floor at the furniture manufacturer Ligne Roset. “It was in the center of the factory and was a very big machine, and most of the time, I was just passing by and it was not being used,” […]
Dora Chair, Studio Palomba Serafini “in this special moment we are looking out for something more, something, how can we say, like a sort of ITI6trOS6XU3l design,” says Roberto Palomba
“I like masculine and rigorous, and I like geometry and also something that is minimal, but why do I have to be boring?” he asks. “Me too, I also dress with blue jeans, but why can’t I use a flower T-shirt? I am a man, a straight guy, but also I can wear something that […]
Decompression Space Chair, Matali Crasset “This chair had a very specific brief at the beginning,” says Matali Crasset. “FeliceRossi gave the same base to four or five designers. They had a chassis, and then they were to do four or five models on the same technique, like a car.”
The base provided by the furniture manufacturer was to be made in roto-molded plastic. “They sent the drawing and said we had to finish it,” says Crasset, who immediately saw the raw potential in the simple structure. “I decided not to cover the base,” she says. “It is an industrial piece and well-finished. It was […]
“This chair is an example of how something that is very complicated for typical indUStrisUzStion can be made,” says Humberto Сатрапа of the Corallo chair designed by him and his brother Fernando
It is also an example of how, in the creative process, nothing really gets lost, and even things that have been set aside for a decade can suddenly spring back to life. When Humberto started making chairs back in the early 90s, he fabricated a seat made of wire and wood rings. “It was very […]
Clkrak Chair, Adrien Gardere “I wanted to study traditional crafts in India and other places in Asia in order to project how they could be reconsidered and made relevant to contemporary design, not for the cheap manufacturing
and local labor, but on the contrary, for their enriching and inspiring traditional know how, that might be disappearing otherwise.” So, began a great adventure for Adrien Gardere that spanned several years and many trips from France to various parts of Asia. “The idea was to try and understand the phenomenon where the process of […]
Buttercup Chair, Blu Dot Design and Manufacturing Blu Dotis a trio of college friends who came together after independent careers in art, architecture, and marketing to design and manufacture “furniture for everyday people with everyday needs.”
President John Christakos puts it simply: “The three things we’re about are elegant design, simplicity of manufacturing, and affordability. We’re trying to take the elitism out of design.” With these fundamental principles in mind, Christakos and his partners Maurice Blanks and Charlie Lazor at Blu Dot set themselves the seemingly straightforward task of making a […]