Weighing in at a ton…in this corner…the White Brick Club Chair.
Blurring the line between outdoor and indoor furniture to the hilt, the club chair was designed in a continuation of John Houshmand’s material-led style. Moreover, it was also conceived in reaction to a flood of live-edge wood design that hit the market a few years after John resurrected the concept. In-house the line was deemed…The Retaliation Collection! (More on this in a future post…)
Like a phoenix rising from the ashes, John envisioned the design after eyeing a literal pile of bricks that had been cast aside from an installation at the Mary Boone Gallery in New York. Since John and Mary have been cohorts through his building her home as well as galleries, she was pleased to see them taken into his hands for a rebirth.
Striking in its physical presence, many a visitor to the showroom has skeptically sat down only to become awash in shock and awe at its comfortable grip. There is even a certain individual who attends all our openings and events who beelines with a glass of wine in hand to relax in its embrace and remains there for the duration of the party like a king holding court.
Do note: there is a sly inclusion of wood amongst the rank and file bricks. Perfectly placed on the lower right side, a solitary Black Walnut brick enters the mix to bear the chair’s style and edition number as well as John’s signature. Like all of our pieces, each work created is an individual and marked as such for provenance and posterity. And like all of our pieces, we love wood just a little too much to see it a total absence of it in any one of our designs.
Perfect for an urban garden or the living room, the White Brick Club Chair is solid as a rock.
The CLEARLY FUNCTIONAL line came to be from the wish to marry the airy glassine quality of acrylic with the substantial and vital quality of wood. The design world is full of plastic and acrylic products which for the most part we find alienating, ugly, and harsh. It was considered that if we could transform that problem with a natural element, we might get a magnificent synergy and an iconic design as well. As we developed methods of attaching the two materials invisibly and minimally, and as we also experimented with casting a “plastic” into a natural material (live-edge wood), we unleashed a fiesta of exciting designs that hit the mark…extraordinary visual appeal, industrial design pedigree, and a real wood component that takes us into the world of fine furniture. Win, win, win, win, win…fun, fun, fun, fun…cool, cool, cool, cool.
Years ago I began playing with a series of visual languages that emanated from dice…that magical little pair of cubes that has an almost platonic and mystical appeal. A numbering system that jives with a cube-face multi-dimensionality, and all the while screaming the mysterious rules of chance and probability. That resulted in page after page of visual language games that became viral in my mind. It was inevitable that I had a desire to express a line of furniture that was contrasting wood against synthetics. “Solid Surfacing” material is perfect for this. It is similar to this popular stuff found in kitchens and it’s made of an acrylic polymer and something called (according to the folks at Wikipedia at least) “alumina trihydrate” – which is simply a fancy way of saying that you can do almost anything with this stuff – mold it, sand it, you name it. I decided that moving from wood and clear acrylic to wood and white was a natural choice and “Martian Dice” was born. What would dice look like on another planet? What would furniture look like on another planet? The rest is visually self explanatory.
Polarity was a theme that took off as a result of the Martian Dice crap game. Wood has such bipolar visual divergence, the most pronounced being ebony against sitka spruce. Not your best combination for furniture, each being prized for its musical instrument qualities and hyper-rare. However, our Eastern mountains are replete with maple and black walnut. Not a bad ride…The line designed itself, jumping from one piece to the next almost instantaneously. It is a lot easier to channel than to labor, so I went with it. Once they were a family, I hit upon the problem of what to do with those pesky little glider pads that go under furniture. Nothing really works… wood blocks, felt, silicone discs. And then came the shoemaker’s art and the perfect solution. The little leather heel that meets the road beneath every good pair of walkers and stilettos on the planet. A never fail solution and just what a good pair of saddle shoes needs.
