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Doeloe Lounge Chair and Pretzel Bench by Abie Abdillah

Abie Abdillah is a furniture designer from Jakarta, Indonesia who has been working for a year as an in house designer at Chamdani, a furniture company in Indonesia. He has recently designed two pieces, the Doeloe Lounge Chair and Pretzel Bench.

Doeloe Lounge Chair
The idea for Doeloe Lounge Chair arose when Abie was delighted by a lovely picture of Jakarta in the 1970s. Since he was born at 1986, he explains that he “never felt the ‘classic and fresh with blue skies Jakarta.’ When you have any chance or experience to come to Jakarta, I think you will agree with what I mean. You could barely see any blue sky now in Jakarta, and in exchange you would see gray skies and added with smokes from the vehicles that really are helpful on making the blue skies kept away.”

From the designer:

Living in a city that’s already crowded and hectic, makes me often surprised seeing new buildings, apartments, and malls were still built rapidly these days in Jakarta. This condition makes me wonder how it felt to live in Jakarta on the 1970s, when there are still many green places spread along the city.

From an eager to live on a time that I never felt, I want to create a furniture that took a piece of shape that could resemble that time. And this is why the Doeloe Lounge Chair was created.

Doeloe (read: dulu) means “a time that has passed.” Inspired by a design of “Oplet” (modified from Morris or Austin van designs), public transportation vehicles that used in Jakarta on 1930s to 1979. Using rattan materials, which are consider as a classic material, “doeloe” was meant to represent my feelings to live on a time that I wish I could had.

Pretzel Bench
The Pretzel Bench idea was conceived in order to showcase the beauty of rattan, a sustainable material that is sourced from Indonesia, but isn’t currently “in style.” However, Abie’s intention was to create a contemporary rattan look in an effort to create some renewed interest in rattan.

From the designer:

Rattan is a unique material that mainly from South East Asia, especially from Indonesia which was claimed that 70% of worldwide needs for rattan materials are from the country own resources. Why is rattan unique? Rattan as a plant could grow more than 100 meters long and have 600 various kind of species which about only 8% of them are already explored and used as raw material for human needs products.

The other uniqueness of Rattan are the characteristics of the material itself, which are strong, and able to be bend. But yet, it was tricky to create a piece of furniture from rattan materials, since the bendy characters make them need to have various braces support to keep the furniture strong and steady.

And to create a piece of furniture from modular shapes that came from continuous lines of rattan materials, is my attention when create the Pretzel Bench. The pretzel shape was taken because it had a continuous line shapes and looped as a rope tie. Pretzel Bench was meant to show the most unique of rattan material characteristics, which is the “bendy” character.

More photos:

Jaime Derringer, Founder + Executive Editor of Design Milk, is a Jersey girl living in SoCal. She dreams about funky, artistic jewelry + having enough free time to enjoy some of her favorite things—running, reading, making music, and drawing.