As part of our furniture acquisition for our new office, we decided to incorporate a bit of our culture, our sketches, and our connection to a special client…all while creating functional, one-of-a-kind furniture for our kitchen café.
We engaged Artists for Humanity (we designed their EpiCenter ) to help us with the execution of the design. The process started with hosting AFH students in our new studio while we were under construction. We talked them through the layout of our space and the look and feel of the finished space. After a few design charrettes and many iterations of the shapes and sizes of each piece of furniture, the benches and tables began to take shape.
We dug into our archives and retrieved sketches which date back to the 1960s to our current diverse portfolio. We decided on shapes and sizes that could work in a variety of different ways depending on how staff wanted to use the tables and benches during lunch or a place where an impromptu meeting could occur. We also incorporated the window sills as part of the seating solution.
Once the form was developed, the next step was searching through the sketches and layering them so that the different colors of sketch paper, pen, marker, and pencil- along with the different style of hand drawings and doodles- would complement each other.
The sketches were placed on cabinet-grade hardwood plywood substrate and then a high-gloss, eco-friendly polymer resin coating was poured. The legs of the benches and tables frames are made from mild steel which was then applied with a white power coat finish.
Topics: Artists for Humanity, Arrowstreet Move