Furniture & Lighting

Zens

Our collaboration with ZENS began as a long-term project with a clear shared intention: to create culturally rooted and ecologically responsible products, made in the region using materials that belong to it. The first range, shown at Guangzhou Design Week, was a bamboo lighting collection. Bamboo is still rarely used as a technical material in the Western world despite being one of China's most enduring cultural icons, and we wanted to celebrate that. Each light in the collection has its own shape, form and character, inspired by the way sunlight filters through the canopy of a bamboo forest. We also produced a bone china tableware collection for ZENS depicting traditional Asian patterns, again working with materials and decorative languages that have been used for millennia in the region. The second phase of the collaboration, shown at Maison et Objet Paris in 2018, expanded into furniture: the Angle and Arc series, which takes the natural characteristics of bamboo and pairs them with solid iron frames through a slow bending process that forms a seamless seat and backrest. The iron reinterprets shapes connected to the Ming Dynasty into a contemporary context, and the two materials, one warm and organic, one cool and structural, sit in quiet, considered contrast to one another.