|
|
||
|
The furniture designer and self-confessed “wood nerd” talks to Katie Treggiden about his work “Designer produces table with metal legs” is hardly a snappy headline. Or at least not until you realise that the designer is Sebastian Cox, winner of a 2011 Wood Award. Known for his work with British hardwood, his table legs are more likely to be branches with the bark still intact. “Growing up in woodlands, I had an emotional connection with wood,” he says. “That got me interested in design.” He studied at Lincoln and then stayed on for a masters in sustainable design: “Wood is grown using sunlight and produces oxygen – if you invented a new material that did that, people would be all over it!” Now, Cox is keen to work with other craftsmen, combining this knowledge with their expertise: “My interest in materials comes from a fascination with craft. I love watching people work and seeing little nuances, like the bounce of a blacksmith’s hammer on the anvil between strikes. Interesting things happen at intersections between different practices.”
Cox’s first collaboration is with product designer Anthony Dickens and blacksmith Richard Fishenden of Made by the Forge. The result is that table with metal legs – part of a collection for Heal’s called Tree to Table. Keen to recreate his excitement in selecting wood at the timber yard, Cox has designed waney-edged table-tops – each a full-width vertical slice of a tree trunk – in oak, ash, limed beech and sycamore, which customers select from racks in-store. With the aid of Heal’s staff, customers attach four cast-iron legs in the shape of tuning forks at home, which Fishenden has beaten into a tapered form and finished with beeswax. Cox is also working with ceramics designer Billy Lloyd on a collection that combines coppiced hazel from Kentish trees with ceramics made from the clay in which they grew, and also with Thomas Appleton on a series of tables utilising stone and wood indigenous to the same area. 2016 promises to be a busy year! |
Words Katie Treggiden
Image: Jon Cardwell |
|
|
||
