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News Tagged ‘Designer-Maker’
A Day In The Life Of… Richard Baker, International Furniture Guru.
Thursday, October 1st, 2015My alarm goes off at 6.00 am…
well actually my wife’s alarm goes off, I don’t have an alarm. Libby gets up to do all sorts of secret stuff for and with the kids, I roll over. At seven I awake again, mostly because a five year boy is slapping me about the face. I check my emails in bed, well I pretend to as I haven’t got any, I look at spelltower instead. At seven thirty I get up, shower, shave my entire head and eat breakfast, cereal as usual or whatever is left in the bottom of all the various boxes the kids consider empty, today it’s a dusty special K, shreddies, coco pops combo. I drink a sweet builders tea, his name is Ted, he says he doesn’t mind but tells me off for missing an apostrophe. The gym beckons so Libby goes, I open the front door for her, I need the exercise as I am thinking of training for a triathlon. I get dressed in something versatile that passes for smart, in the International Furniture Guru business I could be doing anything from meeting an unsuspecting client to blowing the dust out of the bottom of a mug, although compared to what my kids are wearing I look like a well meaning tramp. I walk the boys to school, at the school gate all the mothers huddle, they smile at me inscrutably, one day I will pluck up enough courage to speak to them. On the way to work I pick up a health drink and a fresh fruit yoghurt at my favourite cafe, Harry the owner tells me to put them down as the chap he’s made them for is looking anxious, Harry hands me my egg and bacon sarnie and it’s off to Rume.
I am responsible for…
earning all the money, at least that’s what I tell everyone, especially Libby. She just smiles and gives me a pat on the head and a biscuit. I am also the only one who can open the high windows at the back of a shop, I have fashioned a special pole with a hook, the girls all say they can’t do it but actually I think they just don’t want to, it’s a man thing, like coal mining or putting the bin out.
I got my job…
because my father owned the company, we are a bit like the Borgias, except without all the sex, drugs and violence, so nothing like the Borgias. Actually Libby and I started Rume and employed each other because, coincidentally, we were perfect for the jobs we had in mind for ourselves.
My typical day…
is spent standing in front of my computer, I don’t sit, that has to mean something, standing is hard work. I design furniture, by trying to forget the internet exists, and do almost all of the talking. Sometimes I will say something worth listening to, just ask Heather, she sits next to me doing all sorts of unknowable business but as she is sitting I’m not sure if it counts as work. I know when I’m talking rubbish as her eyes slide very slowly to the left. I am always on the phone, but increasingly it’s with a nice lady who keeps trying to give me free money for having PPI that I never took out on a loan I never had. I have tried to tell her this but she doesn’t listen. I am certainly kept busy, being an International Furniture Guru takes a lot of explaining.
My most memorable work moment…
would be this afternoon, I don’t have a particularly good memory but I distinctly remember turning the open sign round, it had something else written on the back. Other than that I have done loads of work for very celebrated people, not that you would be interested in that, bread and butter. Closed, it had closed written on the back.
The worst part of my job…
would be cutting up cardboard boxes. People are always coming in and asking if we have any cardboard boxes because they are moving house or storing all of their happy memories in the attic and I always feel terrible because I would have just spent the entire morning cutting every cardboard box we have into very small pieces. I save them up in the hope that someone will want them but they never do until the moment after I cut them up. I look them straight in the face and say no, sorry we have no boxes. It feels like a lie. Their and my disappointment is palpable, sometimes it is hard being an International Furniture Guru.
The best part of my job…
is the variety, one day I will be standing in the shop thinking about plumping a cushion and the next I will be in the shop plumping a cushion.
After work…
I am going to retire to Cornwall, Libby has a lovely house down there. I am hoping that she will let me live with her, unless you mean what am I doing after work today? In which, case being a Friday, I am going to the pub with my most excellent friend Hugh, the International Architectural Guru, where we will raise hearty toasts to the International fraternity, drink heady beer from heavy tankards and stroke each other’s hoary beards.
(Richard actually is a furniture designer and when he isn’t busy poking fun at himself and the world can be found designing beautiful furniture for all the best reasons. Seriously. Why not let him make your life a better place?)
Remains of the lush interior
Wednesday, October 9th, 2013Fashion is unfamiliarity. The reason that fashion doesn’t last is simple. It preys on a very basic human mechanism. Curiosity. We are hardwired to notice the unfamiliar, for good reason. Can I eat it? Can I sleep with it? Can it kill me? Once we have identified it as a rock, a sheep and a tree we lose interest. This doesn’t stop the fashion industry from continually redesigning rocks, sheep and trees though. And when I say the fashion industry I don’t just mean clothes, I mean everything from cars to HP sauce, everything that is old is new again, but this is not always a good thing. Sometimes familiarity breeds content.
We all have things that we love forever, a toy, a pair of shoes, an old motor bike something by Fleetwood Mac. Things that we have recognised for what they are. This is what I try to do with my furniture, make it fashion proof. Anticipate the end of the journey from the beginning, I design things to last not only in time but also in spaces. It is a trait I look for in everything, will I still love it tomorrow.
My phone is a good example. I still have a 4s because it is better looking than the 5. I loved my phone as it was, it was a friend I wanted to keep. I loved iOS 6 too, it was way beyond fashion. I loved its personality, its sense of humour, its pinstripe suit, the way it looked real, like you could press or pluck or turn it. Not because I am too stupid to recognise a plainer button but because of its extravagance and because the dreaded minimal ultimately means we all end up living in the same empty concrete box, albeit one with a pastel paint scheme.
I guess I can understand the logic, they want to tempt younger users, cool and groovy types, less fuddy duddy more faddy daddy. Old lamps for new. It explains the 5c which looks like it has been designed to tempt children into a gingerbread house but it does somewhat ignore an ever increasing but terribly unfashionable part of the apple user base. The old.
My father is 83. Unlike his ipad he has left the pursuit of the perfect model far behind and becomes slightly more inferior with every update. Having just watched him trying to navigate his way around his freshly skinned device by touching every single word on a page on the off chance it did something I felt like asking mister Jony Ive to step outside. It was a nice night. There were stars.
My father calls his home button the ‘going home button’ and his homepage his front room and in his front room he had furniture, after an hour with iOS 7 he said to me ‘put the old furniture back would you son’. Sorry dad but this is the new world where the furniture is all modern, hard, where you sit on your bones.
I have taken to calling my 4s the reformation phone because it looks like a sacked abby with all its beauty stripped bare by the iconoclast general, the man who took the fun out of functional. An austere phone for austere times.
My dad will get used to it, we all will, we will barely remember how lush the interior once was, how finely tooled, how upholstered and any further changes will be seen as progress. Quick march. As Lindsey Buckingham from that Fleetwood Mac once said. Never going back again.
Designer beards and how to wear them
Friday, September 27th, 2013Designers wear beards. There I’ve said it, I wasn’t going to because I’m not sure anyone else has noticed. I know Hipsters wear beards but this is different, this is professional. It used to be those skinny rectangular glasses and scarves in summer but now it is beards. I don’t mean goatees, I mean proper, full on, is that a robin I see nesting, beards. I’m talking about men designers of course, well mostly. They can be tangly, or boxy or straggly as long as they are manly, serious, has anyone seen my pipe beards.
Just got back from Tent London, via Super Brands and Design Junction. Three major shows in The London Design Festival, lots of capital letters in the capital city and what did I learn? Designers wear beards, the kind that draw attention on aircraft. I kept on getting distracted, I wanted to look at the things on display, I had come a long way, well from Hove at least (if you’re wondering it’s the posh bit that Brighton is attached to) but every show was like a ZZ Top convention.
I wanted to run amok with a pair of shears, the common or garden variety, not because I meant them harm but because I can’t grow one myself and I’m a designer dammit! I tried to get some photos instead, but bearded designers are shy creatures, like Ewoks. At one point I saw three in a group, all facing inwards, a sort of bearded circle, I couldn’t help thinking how magnificent they looked, I kept expecting the beards to get together, to knit, to weave, the way they waggled they seemed to be having a conversation of their own, any moment they are going to leave, I thought, go off on their own and design something. Maybe that is it, maybe that is the secret, designers don’t wear beards, beards wear designers. It’s the beards that do all the work, the designers are just for cover. Perhaps I don’t need one after all.
But enough about designers let’s talk about design, lots and lots of design. The London Design Festival is difficult to nail down, it used to be London Design Week, but so huge has it become that it is now impossible to squeeze it into just seven measly days. With great size comes great danger, bigger is not necessarily better if the good stuff has just been spread more thinly. I wanted to remain positive, I was under orders not to slip into negativity, don’t look at everything I was told, so I tried not to but I still feel I saw too much. After a while it becomes difficult to separate the life less ordinary from the lifeless, ordinary, you develop fatigue and your critical faculties start to falter. At one point I found myself admiring a table with four fire axes for legs. What is wrong with you? Enquired Libby. Well, it would be useful in a fire, I replied in my defense.
Things were almost universally well constructed, a paean to the laser cutter and CNC router, but much of what was on offer was made simply because it is now so much easier to make it. This is not reason enough, where was the daring? Where was the verve? I am a big fan of the ill advised, partly I guess because I can never afford to be. I love it when someone designs something that is too stupid to exist, then builds it anyway. Sometimes design should be about crazy, that is where the wonder comes from, often it won’t work but every now and then something that appeared completely daft on paper will make sense of the world.
I used to work in theatre as a props maker and one of my favourite directors would create plays of such joyful, riotous, bonkersness that two out of three would not succeed. One out of three however would be utterly brilliant and for years he was allowed to fail because the payoff would be worth it. But then the management changed and ushered in a new age of pragmatism, every play had a financial target, there were season ticket holders and sponsors to keep happy, so everything became even, became safe, became ordinary. Perhaps that is where we are now, the corporatisation of London Design Week and never has it been more important that every once in a while someone gets to build a table with fire axes for legs.
This just in: No beards spotted at Decorex. Make of it what you will.
From the prosaic to the mosaic
Wednesday, September 11th, 2013Inspiration is a funny old thing, subject as it now is to the prosaic. Even the word itself has become pedestrian. No longer the sole province of divine influence, inspiration can now refer to the inexplicable impulse you felt just before covering your entire car in pink polyester fur. You can even blame it for the irresistible urge to have a weird flightless bird tattooed on your neck or the writing of a love poem to your girlfriend’s mother. Inspiration can be that versatile and that uninspiring. Even so I must confess to struggling with the occasional bout. I love the feeling as an unbidden idea rises in my mind like some ever expanding bubble from the deep. POP! True most of them are rubbish, but occasionally I will have one that doesn’t involve tortoises and roller skates. I like to think the Fret cabinet is one of them.
A few months back whilst going to the park with the boys I passed a house with the type of decorative concrete block wall that was popular in the seventies. I was immediately arrested and stood staring at the pattern, I had seen it somewhere before. ‘What do you think of that?’ I asked Jake the elder. ‘Horrid.’ He said with the conviction of all of his ten years. I nodded and walked on. A couple of days later I was stuck on a new design for a sideboard when the pattern on the blocks just jumped into my head. After a little research and being very pleased with its origins I came up with a design for a cabinet incorporating it in the doors. I showed it to my brother, he wasn’t sure. ‘I’m not sure,’ he said. ‘It reminds me of something.’ I nodded sagely. ‘It’s Moorish.’ I told him. ‘What, like a chocolate digestive.’ He replied. I smiled wanly and went on to explain that I meant the Moors, you know Mosaics? Granada? Alhambra Palace? The most beautiful building in the world? He looked at me doubtfully, then shook his head. ‘Nah, I know where I’ve seen it,’ he said. ‘Nanny Baker’s front wall.’
Nine Things: Mugs & Cushions
Wednesday, August 7th, 2013What was I saying? Oh yes mugs and cushions. As it is highly unlikely that any of this is being read in the order in which it is being written I will now, as promised, open a small sunlit window onto the dark and mysterious world of mugs and cushions. How something that is basically a glorified pillow case can cost as much as a chinese washing machine and can inspire levels of devotion normally only associated with one direction has still not been convincingly explained to me by she who buys everything. But they do. Here then are some of my favourites for no particular reason and in no particular order. Tell the joke, cue the laughter. Cushions first. Mugs after.
A beautiful cushion, thick dense cotton velvet with a screen printed bee in four colours by the wonderfully monikered Glaswegian design group Timorous Beasties. Not inexpensive but this doesn’t seem to put people off, it appears to be one of the things you just have to have.
A lovely natural woolen cushion designed by Kerry Stokes for Chalk. There is something extraordinary about the merge of colours in fern, a hint of the forest floor, in less skilled hands it wouldn’t work but Kerry makes it look easy and beautiful. Was that a deer?
This cushion exemplifies the ever so slightly bonkers work of Lara Sparks. First she draws it, then she embroiders it, then she screen prints it, then she appliqués it. The end result is unique and has consumed improbable amounts of time and ability. Never let it be said that it is only a cushion.
When the fabulous cat monocle cushions first arrived in our shop I emailed Rory Dobner the artist responsible and told him they were too small and would never sell for £95.00. A few days later I emailed him again to ask for some more because we had sold out. What do I know about cushions?
Ink Forest is an example of cushions as art. Central St Martin’s graduate Kristjana S. Williams hasn’t just settled on the cushion case as her canvas she has embraced it. The result is spectacular, a series of fantastically intricate illustrations on silk or cotton. Still hoping for a range of toilet roll covers.
Lush the design duo responsible for the fox and cubs mug also make a fox and cub cushion, of course they do, thus creating the perfect bridge between the two. This mug is beautifully printed with gold foil inlay for extra goldiness and can contain the strongest tea or coffee with ease.
Martha Mitchell lives in Brighton and thought she should let a lot strangers know about it. So she printed a map of local landmarks leading to her place on a cup and saucer and let us sell it for her. It is also rumoured to contain her phone number and a hand drawn selfie.
Rob Brandt has been making ceramic crinkled ‘plastic’ cups for years, now he has gone even further and has started making ceramic enamelled ‘tin’ cups, the type of tin cup you might expect Elvis to drink black coffee from whilst swivelling his incarcerated pelvis. Jailhouse cups rock.
Peter Ibruegger knows how to maketh the man, or woman for that matter. Put the mo of their dreams on their mug. Why not be fu manchu? Or Charlie Chaplin? Or even Magnum P.I? Hold on. Cripes, I appear to have lost all critical faculty. As my Father once said a mug is just a hole you pour tea into.
