Raw Matter Pt3

House keeping: You've made it to the final event of our first mini series! Woot! Woot! Thank you so much for your time. Today we are going to be talking about the blending of materials into design and planning for our furniture and renovation projects. I've been looking forward to this one!

A few years ago I discovered that Porsche Design, yes the car company, had designed and made a kitchen that they released in 2014. Do what? I had never seen anything like it, it was the epitome of modern, and being a car obsessed dude... I loved it. It doesn't quite hold the same sway today, it's a smidge to much for me now, but it looked like this:

It shifted my paradigm of what I thought cabinets were, and what a kitchen was, and what $150,000 was, and this was when I really could have cared less about appliances and cabinets, I was so deep into cars I basically breathed gasoline fumes. Sidebar - On a separate occasion, I one day wrote with a $600 Porsche Design pen made from a racing GT3 cup car brake hose, it wrote like a silk dream, and that same day I gave a "flick" to a $900 Dupont lighter made of gold and jade... Talk about mixing materials, both great examples!

This certainly made a mild impression on my sense of style and my penchant for modern design, and fits the bill here for a wonderful mixture of materials. Stainless frames and 4 different color choices, one being carbon fiber doors, or the wooden doors shown here. I believe they were black acrylic countertops.

On the more contemporary and traditional veins... I took a walk through two of the local home furnishing stores and snagged a few pictures, see if you can spot the different materials and textures:

Stone and glass, wood and iron, brass and leather, more wood and metal, acrylic and wood, cloth, etc... See how materials play a function in the overall look of a trend or style.

Here are a few quick sketches I did for this weeks blog... lets take the contemporary chair and run some materials through it in planning to build a pair for the office...

Office A is an art studio for a children's book illustrator:

The legs are two pieces, made from softly bright maple on the top, and the foot section in that super wild and saturated beauty of the purpleheart wood from Pt1... ⬇

We'll use the purple heart again for the frame under the seat and the frame holding up the back...

But for the seat and back itself, well use meganite, maybe this one: Kauai Beach

Its kind of a twist on the colors, but the light stone under that polished sheen will contrast the matte softness of the woods and bring out a playful subtlety that will hold the cheer of the room even on the greyest of days.

Office B is an engineering firm that specializes in prototype racing automotive parts:

We take it modern and do the legs in brushed aluminum mated tightly against polished stainless steel, and then milled aluminum for the frames, with a gorgeous twill weave carbon fiber in its natural liquid gloss black. We'll set it off with the muted satin grey of titanium fasteners, for the last touch of some engineer's wet dream.

Same chair, two vastly different worlds. What fits your passion? What fits your work? What fits your FLOW?

I challenge you to look at the drawings again and find three different materials that you see working in harmony. Let me know what you came up with!

Luckily for you, if you're reading this blog, you're pretty likely to be ahead of the curve on the taste game... 😉 so I'm looking forward to hearing!

What do you think? Let's design some pieces!

Thanks so much for reading along!

Have a great week,

Nick