Face Stool
London, 2020
Face Stool
Made from off-cuts
Studiomama's design transforms wood offcuts into unique, playful furniture. By using traditional joinery techniques, each piece features an anthropomorphic 'winking' face on the seat, with irregular, whimsical legs. This project emphasizes sustainability and creativity, turning waste materials into functional art with a distinct character and presence.
The design process
As part of Studiomama’s ongoing exploration of sustainability in its different forms, we have been working with the idea of how we can make use of waste material from different kinds of waste streams at a local level. Whilst working with the master carpenters Benchmark project we saw beautiful offcuts of wood in the workshop. We asked if we could take some of these and give some thought as to what we could make with them. Each piece of offcut wood has its own colour, thickness and dimension. We loved how these random offcuts could come together to make something unique every time.
We developed the idea of making a simple characterful face on the surface of the seat whilst using a traditional joinery technique. Once we set the geometry of the design, we started to sort the offcuts according to the dimensions needed to make the seat and legs. Now the formula for making the design was set, we could leave to chance which kind of wood we could use to assemble each piece, adding the playfulness and character of the design created. An interesting aspect of this project is that creativity comes in the act of making. It comes with collaborative selection and sorting of every piece of offcut and seeing how they relate together.
The design of the abstract ‘winking’ face takes on an anthropomorphic nature when seen with the odd-shaped legs that make up the rest of the object. Aesthetically, there is distilled simplicity whilst having the sculptural essence of the ‘ready-made’. The combination of these visual qualities gives the object a sense of presence in the space it occupies. The stool is available to buy in our online store.
CLIENT: Studiomama
DESIGN: Studiomama
PHOTOGRAPHY: Dennis Pedersen