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Projects, materials, prototypes — the thinking and making behind the objects. Click any story to read.
Forty rooms, one arrival sequence, eleven prototypes. How a boutique hotel learned to glow — and what hospitality taught us about repetition.
The brief arrived as a floor plan and a feeling: warm, low, golden. The lobby needed to hold guests at 11pm the way it held them at 11am — so we designed the light first and the furniture around it.
Eleven prototypes later — three pendant scales, two cane densities, one very patient hotelier — the arrival sequence resolved into clustered cane domes over travertine, with woven lounge chairs pulling the eye inward. Production ran in two phases against the opening date; every piece was photographed at packing and every carton numbered to its room.
The lesson hospitality keeps teaching us: a product isn't finished when one is perfect. It's finished when the fortieth is identical to the first.
Why we photograph every new mesh under magnification before it ever becomes a chair.
Tension is invisible at full scale and obvious at 10×. A weave that drifts by half a millimetre per pass becomes a chair that leans — so every new mesh is woven, photographed under magnification, measured, and only then released to the frame jigs. The macro lens is our strictest quality inspector.
Cardboard lies. Timber approximates. Brass tells the truth about weight, balance and light.
It's more expensive and we do it anyway. A first prototype in final material answers every question at once — how it stands, how it feels, how light moves across it. Clients approve faster, production surprises vanish, and the prototype often becomes the photography piece. Truth early is cheaper than truth late.
Designing a pendant that holds the room even when it's switched off.
Most lighting is designed glowing. We design ours dark first — as pure form on the workbench. If the silhouette, proportion and surface earn their place unlit, the glow becomes a second act rather than a disguise. LN°01 went through nine spun profiles before the curve held.
A morning on the workshop floor, where the weave is tuned like an instrument.
There is a sound a correct weave makes — a low, even tick as each pass seats against the last. Our senior weaver hears a loose pass before he sees it. Mornings on the floor start with the previous day's panels held to the light, and anything that doesn't ring true goes back to the frame.
What are you working on?