Animals Series
An ongoing series built on a method that absorbs the studio's own offcuts. Reclaimed legs captured in an angled patchwork top, with nothing carved to fit.
The series interprets the French stool and bench typology found across the brocantes of Paris. Those pieces are utilitarian and everywhere, and almost all of them are built the same way, with a turned or squared leg seated into a carved mortise. We wanted to arrive at the same typology a different way, inside the language and the constraints the studio already works to.
Instead of cutting a mortise for each leg, studio offcuts are cut at an angle and composed into a patchwork that captures the leg, at ten degrees on the stool and the bench and at five degrees in a double layer on the console. It fits tight, and it holds a reclaimed leg of any dimension, which means almost nothing has to be refined away. Nothing is carved to fit. The scrap keeps its shape and becomes the piece.
The name comes from how the method behaves. It works like a biological process, adapting to whatever material is available and absorbing waste back into itself while making none of its own. The wood comes from two places, offcuts from the workshop and solid timber taken out of buildings being demolished.
At the scale of bench and stool the technique becomes legible as a system, with several legs of different sections held along one plane. At console height the legs run longer, so the top thickens for a stronger structural connection.
The series is ongoing. New pieces enter it as the method finds material it can absorb, rather than to a plan.
Pieces shown
- Animals Bench
- Animals Stool
- Animals Console