The Monocle Minute
On Design

With summer in full swing, we head outdoors for a seat in the sun before cooling off in Valencia with a breezy backyard break. We also meet with a London-based architect breaking with tradition and flip through a monograph celebrating an elusive designer. But first, Nic Monisse on a Lisbon house (pictured) that’s very much in season.

This summer, self-taught designer Mircea Anghel is opening his Portuguese studio and surrounding grounds to the public for the first time. Located in a cavernous sawmill on a rural estate south of Lisbon, this new hub for art, design and craftsmanship will host some of his most striking pieces in a large-scale exhibition.

Anghel, who works primarily with raw materials such as wood, stone and salt, has been greatly inspired by the skills and knowledge of the boat-building community in Portugal and his work melds age-old woodworking techniques with experimental methods. “Working with boatbuilders has helped me to understand the complex structure of a tree,” says the designer. “Each piece of wood has different properties and potential. Boat building is a combination of selecting the ideal parts and understanding how they work together.”

To help execute the studio’s often gravity-defying designs, Anghel has gathered a diverse team of artisans, including a marine biologist, an architect and a computer programmer, as well as local factory workers. He has also kept the sawmill active to encourage shipwrights and workers from around Portugal to come to the estate to buy and carve wood. “I discovered a huge history of woodworking in this area. There is still much to learn.”
mirceaanghel.com

When friends of architect Paco Oria approached him with a commission for a house, he found himself having to play by the rules. The municipality of Godella in Valencia has strict regulations that require homes to be semi-detached with space for a backyard. The idea is to create bigger gaps between houses to improve living conditions, especially during the hot summer months. “The Mediterranean is our climate and our culture,” says Paco Oria, founder of Paco Oria Estudio. “We are very concerned by the challenge of creating comfortable and efficient spaces for the summer. Heat is a real problem that affects our decisions.”

When creating Barón39 house, Oria chose to include an inner patio for optimum ventilation and used traditional materials such as ceramic blocks and tiles to keep the space cool. With its charming backyard pool, pared-back interiors, streetside bedrooms and traditional rustic Mediterranean palette of creams and blonde wood, this house goes to show that sometimes keeping it simple really is the best practice and that playing within the rulebook need not be a hindrance.
pacooria.es

Outdoor furniture often plays second fiddle to the wares inside a home – but that doesn’t have to be the case. For proof, look to this sunny yellow chair by Parisian brand Tiptoe. Available in a host of different colours, it is sure to brighten up any garden or patio, regardless of the forecast. The chair is part of the brand’s first outdoor range and the seat and backrest are made from recycled plastic with steel legs that support the structure. All of its materials are specifically designed for outdoor use with anti-UV treatment that ensures that the colours won’t fade in the sun.
tiptoe.fr

In 2022, British architect Benni Allan collaborated with London-based contemporary design gallery Béton Brut to produce a furniture range known as the Low Collection. It’s a partnership that the gallerist and designer have reignited with the release of a new colourway for the collection; its low tables and seats are now available in black oak. Here, we talk to Allan about his process and the development of the collection.

Where did your inspiration for the collection come from?
I have always been interested in the way that people sit. I liked the idea of creating something that didn’t necessarily dictate how it should be used. There are many rules to conform to as an architect; I wanted to make something that broke the mould. One by one, the pieces in the collection started to develop their own language and really began to come together as a family of objects. They make you think carefully about how you want to use them.

What production techniques were used to make the pieces?
The whole collection started from an initial exploration into the ways that we could create objects from large pieces of oak. Though the form seems simple, the pieces are incredibly difficult to make. Huge blocks of solid wood need to be laminated, some of which have to be machined in two separate processes and then finished by hand. I see myself as a maker so these pieces were an opportunity for me to use new materials and think about sustainable practices. Much of the work that I do is about exploring construction techniques, proportion and form. Furniture allows me to bring all of these elements together.

Tell us about the new expansion of the collection.
I had always imagined the collection in black, partly because I have an interest in the Japanese technique of shou sugi ban, which gives the wood a beautiful, charred quality that looks shiny from some angles. Originally, all of the pieces were supposed to be dark in colour but other people thought that they were beautiful in their natural oak. You get a different feel from them in black.

For more from Benni Allan, tune in to ‘Monocle On Design’ on Monocle Radio.

As a designer, it is easy to think that most of the furniture that we need has already been made. Take the classic bistro chair, which is as space-saving, lightweight and durable as any chair can be. When it came to Marco Zanuso creating an Italian version of the French classic, he wasn’t trying to improve the patio chair’s practicality. Celestina, which was put into production by Zanotta in 1978, keeps the ubiquitous design exactly as is, except the seat and backrest are made from leather instead of wood.

The Celestina stands for what might now be called a stealth-wealth approach: the thick white leather is so subtly stitched and screwed in place that from a distance, the slats are easily mistaken for wood. Only someone sitting down in it is guaranteed to notice the difference. While Zanuso’s design tweak can hardly be called functional (try leaving a leather bistro chair out in the rain), for a quiet refinement of a classic design, there are few better examples.

A new monograph dedicated to the works of Swiss artist and designer, Not Vital makes essential reading for anyone looking for insight into the notoriously elusive character. Edited by art historian Alma Zevi and published by Skira, Not Vital: Sculpture contains interviews, archival materials and a career-long catalogue of about 450 of his sculptures and ambitious architectural projects over almost 500 pages.

To help make sense of this breadth of work, which spans from Brazil to Switzerland, Zevi has broken his ouevre into collections based on their relationship to particular materials and craft styles. The result is a book that celebrates the radical and nomadic designer’s diverse body of work.
skira.net