trendmatter.com | mac oosthuizen

Recently I walked into a very well known and established design shop while in Amsterdam called Frozen Fountain. Built in the old part of town, it stands right on the edge of a canal, busy with a variety of boats chugging by like cars on a busy urban street. The converted house extends high into the cold dutch air with high ceilings and a second floor as you move to the rear of the shop only accessible via an ‘interesting’ flight of stairs. The walk to the end of the shop takes you through room after room of design classics. The ‘Ooo..’ factor is high here. Everything needs to be sat on and inspected. Designers names are written down and exchanged. Expensive books are picked up, flicked through and put down. You know, the usual.

Except as I was walking around there were two pieces of furniture which kept glaring at me through the jungle of metal, plastic and fabric. Something didn’t quite work about them, it didn’t fit, they didn’t fit. In fact I hadn’t even noticed them at first, and ended up walking straight past them even though they were easily the biggest pieces in the shop. I did the usual, you know, walked around them, stroked their wood exterior, moved moving parts, all like a wannabe motor enthusiast kicking his tires to make himself look ‘in the know’. Putting it straight; these pieces just didn’t fit here, but I didn’t know why, I just couldn’t place it…

Piet Hein Eek is a dutch furniture designer living and working just outside Eindhoven in the Netherlands. He comes from the ‘Droog generation’, at least don’t tell him that. Rebels don’t come more inspirational. Where the Droog generation was blindly looking for ‘the idea’, Eek was simply looking for the process. In a recent icon article (ironically from the Philip Starck “I killed Design” issue) he explains:

“I like the idea that everything we do deals with labour. That’s the story. It’s the opposite of what everybody does, which is the reason why we do it. I formed processes that took a deliberately long time”

Instead of seeking perfection in an idea and passing it off as design, Eek is seeking the idea in imperfection. His ‘The Waste Materials Project‘, which he has been designing for since the year 2000, is a perfect example. He started to collect scrap wood and cut offs from building sites and reclamation yards and transformed the material into a process by which to create stunning pieces of furniture. The colourful strips of wood are painstakingly fit together “simply by seeing which pieces fit where” (icon, december 06). It’s a way of seeing what you can do for the material rather than seeing what the material can do for you by having a respect and a much deeper understanding of what your working with. From Piet Hein Eek’s website:

“the scrap wood cupboard from 1990 was my reaction against the prevalent craving for flawlessness. I wanted to show that products that aren’t perfect still can appeal to our sense of aesthetic and functionality. I also wanted to design a product that could be made with limited means, material that was abundant. The combination of uncommon material and also uncommon, but simple methods of working became the thread through our work.”

This is something that can never be mass produced. What struck me while pondering the furniture was just how obvious it was how the furniture was made. I could see every nail and every joint. Little wood scribbles indicting sizes and measurements where everywhere, left onto the wood, varnished into permanence on the table top. There is a level of connection between the furniture and the observer rarely found in the superstar design of today. Almost like something your dad would have made and given you for your room because they didn’t have enough money for that expensive Ikea desk. It’s a friendly, honest and approachable way of designing that makes room for the user. Put Philip Starck and Piet Hein Eek in a room and ask me which one I would rather approach to talk to after seeing their work, and I know which one I would choose.

This is not a new trend or idea. Many companies and consultancies around the world have played around with the idea, but this is not where the big returns are. For capital driven companies, this would seems like a waste of time, but there is opportunity here for large lifestyle and interior companies to explore. Eek and many other designers and consultancies like Uhuru and 2012 Architect’s project, Recyclicity.net, are already leading the way and promoting this kind of thinking. It’s about embracing the process and using a consumer, waste heavy society to create not only aesthetically pleasing but functional items.

Of course, seeing the price of a lot of the items on show on the website you do wonder whether it isn’t just another theory of practice for bespoke design, often aimed aggressively at the ‘design conscious’. You can simply pass it off as a niche, yet these items do invoke a connection with it’s owner. The price tag is the key to embracing a sustainable piece of furniture, which will probably go with you your entire life. Buying into a lifestyle is ok, but it is too trend heavy and only satisfies for so long. Eek’s furniture is not something you buy to include in a room to simply compliment something else or fill empty space, its something you build your house around. Its about buying a small amount of items with a connection that inspires you to long for other objects that you can make a connection with. Of course nothing will beat the convenience of lifestyle buying, but do we really get as much enjoyment out of something that is convenient, as out of something that really makes us stop, look and wonder.