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Naoshima Stools by Emiliana Design Studio

Emiliana Design Studio — Ana Mir and Emili Padrós — were invited by Spanish furniture company Ziru to create a stool for the contract market that was innovative but not technicologically difficult to manufacture.

From the designers:

We wanted to design a stool were all the parts were related with each other, a stool that could be understood as a continuous object, and not like four legs added to a seat. We started making models, trying structures, joints,…we imagined that the folds we were assaying with paper could end up made in curved plywood. We put a lot of effort in studying the joints between the seat and the legs, both at structural level but also from the aesthetic point of view; we started to like the idea that the whole stool was to be produced in wood, and that the legs could be seen as prolongations of the seat itself. Moreover, as the project progressed, we were attracted by the empty spaces resulting from the different encounters. We visited the plywood supplier to understand the possibilities but also the limitations of that technology. Folded plywood offered us the possibility of achieving a very light seat but at the same time very strong. From the production point of view the challenge has been attaining that the seat is the result of repeating four times one single piece of plywood.

Meanwhile designing the stool we were also developing a table collection. We decided to go on working with plywood and intended that the top of the table literally split to “trap” the central post. Furthermore we came with the idea of using the joint between top and post to add a couple of hooks that allow people hanging a bag in a safety way, specially thinking of public places.

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.