You may have been wondering what the guys at the shop have been developing with this new system of armatures. Here is the newest prototype! It may look complicated. And that’s because it is.
These rollercoaster-esque columns, or as we like to call them “stems”, are a part of our newest architectural project. The possibilities really are endless when using these ultra-flexible and elegant winding forms.
One can’t help but be reminded of one of John’s sculptures from 2008. Ladder, seen below, seems to be at the root of our newest project! This sculptural quality can really seen as a thread through all of our pieces, be it architectural or industrial. Come see it for yourself at the Soho showroom!
Our newest custom finish is pure beauty without the pain: tattooed wood and acrylic. At JOHNHOUSHMAND we love the natural and uncontrollable characteristics in salvaged wood but this “tattoo” finish is a custom dream.
At the shop upstate we create a CAD drawing of the desired graphic and send it to a CNC machine which routes out the graphics from either wood or acrylic. Next we fill the path in with epoxy (which can be any number of colors) to really bring out the image. So not only do we have control over the image but also the color and thickness of line! Flexibility at its finest.
Here are some samples of the clean and crisp shapes created by this process for a project we’re currently working on.
With St. Patrick’s day just around the corner we’ve decided to show our Irish spirit by adding a touch of green to our newest dining table, No. 0233.
No. 0233, the two slab bookmatch black walnut square dining table with laquered metal tube legs is JOHNHOUSHMAND‘s first foray into color. The twelve green legs act not only to support this 7′ x 7’ black walnut table top but also accentuate the beautiful tones in the grain.
At JOHNHOUSHMAND we are continuously looking for unexpected beauty in trees, glass, and metal. One of our most recent sources of inspiration has come from a surprising place: underground.
The root of a tree is something that most people don’t think twice about, but we sure do. In fact, this Cherry Root Coffee Table (No. 164.1) is only the second root table we’ve ever made. This is a special piece as roots are particularly hard to find intact and in good shape for use as a base for a beautiful coffee table.
We love the dimensionality of the wood as it fuses with the glass from both sides. The ends of the roots have been given a new life as they pierce through the starfire glass to truly create a one-of-a-kind piece. From the ground, to our shop in Hobart, this root has already been on a quite a journey… the next stop? Back down under to a beautiful home in Australia.
A lot of people ask us about where we get our beautiful slabs of wood, and the answer really is all around. At JOHNHOUSHMAND we don’t harvest wood for our furniture but instead utilize trees that have been felled or damaged by storms, need to be cut down due to safety or otherwise. Hobart, New York really has become John Houshmand’s home and so he is on a first name basis with numerous members of the Catskill community who let him know if they know of any trees that need to be removed.
It’s inspiring to see every part of the process from helping out another in the community, to having some fun climbing the trees, to starting to the create the custom-made furniture that we love to produce.
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.
The OneTree Project was born out of an extraordinary sequence of events…a meeting between Eric Poncon and John Houshmand in New York where they found their paths in a curious parallel (and a promise to “do something exciting together someday…”), the devastation of 3 million acres of forest lands in northeast Nicaragua’s indigenous frontier region (RAAN), Poncon’s appreciation for the work at JOHNHOUSHMAND, and our mutual love for great design, natural materials, and a philosophically sound interface with reality. And we do mean reality. Nothing unreal about sending a lawyer into the Nicaraguan frontier to search titles for 24,000 acres of small property holdings, negotiating fair purchase of these lands, obtaining IFC assistance, setting up extraction teams and a 12,000 board feet per day sawmill facility, reforestation programs and much, much, more…
Poncon, with architect and designer Matthew Falkiner (Morgan’s Rock eco-hotel, Simplamente Madera furniture company, and more…) invited Houshmand down to the frontier to see firsthand the devastation and the operations, and plan a series of joint ventures which will include projects such as: The “Handshake Collection” of extraordinary pieces designed and fabricated in our New York facilities using amazing wood elements from the immense salvage operation; the “Deep Roots Collection,” designed by Houshmand and Falkiner and made in Nicaragua comprising high design values, affordability, and increasing the training and viability of the local milling and artisan woodworkers; the “OneTree Collection,” a project to put pieces of two giant trees in the hands of 10 Nicaraguan and American artists respectively, and the works to travel as bonding collections. Another germinating concept is another eco-hotel with cabanas designed by guest architects/designers, each getting one tree for their creation. Other projects include value added use of the wood such as wall treatments, prefab housing, gluelam beams, countertops, even balsa surfboards… All FSC certified, all returning profits to reforestation, social, and educational projects, some of which are already falling into place. More to come! There is much more to come as well as an audio slideshow of my most recent trip to the jungles of Nicaragua.
You may have been wondering what the guys at the shop have been developing with this new system of armatures. Here is the newest prototype! It may look complicated. And that’s because it is.
The OneTree Project was born out of an extraordinary sequence of events…a meeting between