05.03.2009 - Product Tank Pine Chair - There are so many chair designs in the world that surely we don’t need any more, I know this and yet I can’t help designing another.

The Human body is very slow to change and a chair designed 100 years ago can be just as comfortable as one designed today. So in most cases, it just becomes a matter of style, which can be very wasteful.

I wanted to try and design and build a chair that was sustainable and easy to build by anyone with some basic carpentry skills/limited tools. I chose pine, because it’s sustainable, fast growing and often associated with cheap nasty furniture. Is it possible to make desirable, premium furniture from cheap sustainable materials? All the wood used is from a local hardware store and is UK grown from Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) managed woodland, there’s no point in a Uk designer designing bamboo furniture, local materials for local solutions. No power tools were used in the manufacture (although the wood was bought pre cut), just a saw, some sand paper, wood glue and a few kettles of boiling water (to bend the pine strips) and some elbow grease.

Eventually everything will break beyond repair, there is no infrastructure for recycling plastic chairs, so if we are going to carry on designing furniture, it’s important to think about it’s life journey. Don’t stop designing chairs, try and improve them functionally and if you can’t, then at least make them from sustainable materials.