<architect and interior designer paris>

Tara’s Palace

May 19th, 2012 _ 1 comment _

In the Museum of Childhood in Powerscourt House just outside Dublin, I recently visited Tara’s Palace, an extraordinary replica 18th century dolls house, built by Irish master craftsmen over 20 years. The dolls house was commissioned by Ron McDonnell of the Irish Antique dealers association, just after the association’s disappointing loss at auction to Lego-land for Titania’s Palace, a similar dolls house, in 1978.

Much of the pieces of furniture are valuable antiques which work in with the twenty two themed rooms that are in keeping with a large Irish 18th century estate house, such as the silver room, the garden room or the nursery. The Ivory room is one of my favourites, where there are tables carved by French Napoleonic prisoners of war, from the bones found in their food.

The Museum of Childhood is run on a benevolent basis to donate to children’s charities. The entry fee is not expensive, it’s free for tiny ones, and they also sell a book about Tara’s Palace so I don’t want to give too much away. When I visited with my children they were in the play area a long time before I was ready to go, so it’s not just for children. There are also the Powerscourt house and gardens to visit, and the Avoca shop and café where I had just as much fun at one of their tables with a fantastic lunch.

David Amar: David

May 15th, 2012 _ 0 comments _

David Amar is an artist and designer who has a storyteller’s approach, with an interest in layering the moments of a table. Here with the David table there is a central basket that hangs hidden below the middle, which is revealed as the table opens up. The fruit seems not just to be a weight that is carried on the table but as a tension force that’s pulling it together and balancing it out, especially when it is open and becomes an ensemble of four smaller interdependent one legged tables. Perhaps this is a deconstruction but I also see it as a poetic reconstruction.

Claudia Bignoli: Paint Table

May 12th, 2012 _ 0 comments _

It’s a great work of balance to create an object that seems so random yet is as evenly structured as Claudia Bignoli’s Paint table. Claudia Bignoli is Milanese architect who has worked on several historic buildings. She has a great interest in what’s going on in the design world and now she concentrates more on furniture design striving for simplicity.

The 150cm diameter MDF tabletop is supported by a fused aluminium base which is unified by seamless paint, (believe me that’s not easy), till it appears to be a dish of floating paint with large glops dripping to the ground.

Zaha Hadid: Liquid Glacial Tables

May 11th, 2012 _ 1 comment _

Zaha Hadid’s office is usually reputed for it’s expression of form, but it has always had a love affair with materials too. I can remember one evening about twenty years ago her partner Patrick Schumacher getting very excited about forming concrete to a sharp point. They knew that it would crumble in places, but there was a desire for the beauty revealed when pushing a material uncharacteristically to its limits, to an extreme, and how that would reveal its intrinsic nature. With this attitude how can one not create the sublime?

The liquid glacial tables are made of acrylic, which reminds me of of the use of resins in model making to represent liquids. The resin can be coloured and manipulated, then it hardens and sets rendering a very realistic effects. When I see this technique used for water in a student’s project, I am so seduced by the water that I need to remind myself to pay attention to the rest of the model.

This table appears to be a pool of water that drains down into columns of water that form the legs, then instantly freezing to ice that retains the movement of the water that can also been seen in it’s shadows. A simple crystal like material forming a sophisticated table ensembles of one or two three legged parts. I do sort of wonder about it’s stability around the single leg end, but then isn’t that where the beauty of it is, pushing the design to an extreme.

VIA

Natalie Sampson Designs: Folding Garden Fork Table

May 7th, 2012 _ 0 comments _

For me this folding fork table is a sort of cousin of the shooting stick, a fantastic gift for the person who has everything. Seriously though have you ever found yourself in a garden in serious need of a horizontal surface for a mug of tea while weeding a flowerbed? Natalie Sampson obviously has.

Patricia Urquiola: Faint

May 6th, 2012 _ 0 comments _

There is a magic effect to the Faint by Patricia Urquiola that can only truly be felt by moving around it, this also makes it next to impossible to be photographed. One end of this glass table has a white finish which then fades to transparent, so it appears to be a solid object that just quietly dematerialises. When you get close up to the zone when the screen printed white fades to halftone dots, then to transparent, there is a moiré effect that vibrates as your eye moves along it, as if the table were made from a sort of shivering techno cloud.

This table is not only a poetic marvel but also a technical masterpiece, as it’s producer, Glas Italia says -”A Monolithic table in transparent extralight glass with tempered top mm. 12 thick, and shaped feet mm. 19 thick. The feet and the top are glued together thanks to a special inclined grinding of the glass. “

It is also available in fully transparent but I think that the extraordinary quality of being invisible is only fully understood when you see it disappear.

Bénédicte de Lescure for La Corbeille: Trestle

May 4th, 2012 _ 0 comments _

One of the smartest new table designs out is from La Corbeille, the trestle has been redesigned by Bénédicte de Lescure so that a table can be created from just one trestle. Now normally if you attempted to pop tabletop up on just one trestle rather than two, the tabletop would just flop off, but by sticking an V that’s like open arms at each end of the trestle, it can support the whole area of the tabletop. It carries a glass tabletop with a diameter of up to 160cm, but if a lighter material like wood is used it could be as wide as 210cm.

Perhaps if this design were jigged a little this trestle could work either way up. Then again that’s probably how this idea started out before it was refined considering it’s load-bearing logic. I imagine that we’ll be seeing variants of this idea over the next few years, since this is such such an economic, convivial and practical solution, I’m sure that sketchbooks are already busy.

Jocelyn Deris for La Corbeille: Sangle

April 17th, 2012 _ Comments Off _

Designed by Jocelyn Deris for La Corbeille, the steel legs of this table are woven through the the oak table top like straps, hence its name in French, Sangle, which means Strap. Deris has a design style where there is often one element treated as a band that wraps around another element, in this case it is these strap legs. One of the advantages of these flat steel bars running across the table-top is to prevent it from bowing. The original design is an oval, but it now exist in circular and rectangular form.

Lucas Martin: Tension Table

April 15th, 2012 _ Comments Off _

I received a lovely e-mail from Lucas Martins back in January when I asked him about the tension table after writing an article about his sweep table. Rather than paraphrase him I’ve just copied what he said here as he explains it so well.

“Thank you so much for your support, and for featuring my table on your blog, which is really great by the way, don’t stop! As far as the Tension table goes, that was a school project in which we had to design and build a table in one week. I tried to make something that evoked a sense of instability while being well-crafted. The plywood and ratchet straps were a nod to moving crates, and the whole table is held together by the tension of these straps. Additionally the “shipping” theme has a base in reality since the table has a low profile when disassembled and could be shipped easily compared to other tables. My favorite feature of the table is that since the table is made of several different components, customers can easily request different styles and sizes of legs, sides, or top to fit their decor. The pieces could be sent back in exchange for new pieces, and the returned pieces could be refurbished into a new table: less waste and more personal customization.”

Lucas Martins: Sweep part 2