words William Wiles

Marigold hates maths. This distaste led to a happy breakthrough for the young designer, 32, who is part of the eight-person London design collective OKAYstudio.

Marigold – who came to attention last year with his Royal College of Art graduation project, Make/Shift shelves, now produced by Movisi – started experimenting with making wooden boxes and decided to abandon the regularity of 90º corners. “I just started randomly dividing things to see what happens,” he says.

The Split series of non-orthogonal shelving units, shown at Milan this year, came out of the idea that splitting a branch any four ways would still create a 360º whole. “I was interested in the idea of distorting the regularity of things. If you have four angles that total 360º, it doesn’t matter what order they come in, you can interchange their position in the overall box, and that means you can have four different boxes with the same four pieces.”

Marigold has now taken the Split principle and extended it to create the Flauna series, which is being further refined into Octave, a set of seven one-offs created for Gallery Libby Sellers in London. In Flauna and Octave, a single branch is split into four pieces that become the corners of a free-standing shelving unit. “These branches were displaying anthropomorphic qualities, so I started to call them Flauna, a mixture of flora and fauna,” Marigold says. “They had these animal qualities that were completely uncontrolled. It just emerges when you assemble them.”

As well as this sense of the animal, the Flauna prototypes had qualities reminiscent of musical instruments, something Marigold decided to emphasise in the Octave series. “There is the discovery of forms within forms, and fundamental underlying logics in nature are something that can also be seen in musical instruments,” he explains. Each of the shelves in Octave will have a circle cut out of them, which will be surrounded with marquetry, like the soundhole in a guitar. Beyond these one-offs, a manufactured version of the Split series in moulded plastic is also in the works.

Considering the musicality of Octave, it seems appropriate that OKAYstudio is based in a former piano factory in Stoke Newington. The studio comprises friends from Marigold’s graduating year at the RCA, and he finds working under the umbrella of a collective more productive. “It keeps you sane; I’m a real loner in general. Having a group of people around giving feedback really helps.”

images David Levene