Malvarosa Apartment - Furniture

Designing furniture is the scale at which architecture can no longer postpone decisions. A badly resolved joint in a wall stays two metres away; in a drawer it sits under your hand, every day.

The walnut chest is made out of that demand. The drawer fronts are cut in sequence from the same board, so that the grain crosses the whole piece without interruption, and the handle disappears — it is a continuous slot in the thickness of the front, which keeps any applied fitting from breaking the drawing. The volume sits on slim, set-back steel legs that lift it off the floor and let it read as a suspended block. The bedside unit repeats the same timber as a cantilever, never touching the ground.

The plywood prototype shows the other half of the work, the half the finished piece never reveals: a machined V-shaped steel bracket and the turned rods that pass through it. The hardware is drawn and tested in the rough before there is any final timber — it is what decides whether the piece works, not the other way round.

The lamps belong to the same family of decisions in another material. The body is textile, pleated and translucent, and it is the pleat that does the work: it diffuses the source, gives volume to a piece that weighs almost nothing, and turns the floor lamp into a column of light rather than an illuminated object.