Making the cut

The landscape of the furniture industry is changing: global supply chains are strained, making access to materials difficult and consumers are demanding products that enhance their wellbeing by being designed, produced and supplied transparently. We profile five brands rising to these challenges.

Part & Whole
Making repairable furniture
Canada

“A sofa is this large piece of furniture that you typically only buy a couple of times in your life. It’s almost more in line with buying a car,” says Guy Ferguson, brand director of Canadian furniture company Part & Whole. It was this realisation that led Ferguson, who co-founded the Victoria, British Columbia-based firm in 2018, to try to solve the more cumbersome conundrums that can be associated with the mass-manufacture of sofas.

“A typical sofa is massive and bulky, and one of the main failure points on a piece of furniture like this is suspension,” he says. “Eventually, with use, that suspension – either springs or woven – will begin to fail, and then that entire product is likely to end up in the garbage or be very costly to rebuild.”

Responding to this challenge, Part & Whole has designed modular sofas (its first piece, named Total, was made available in 2021 after a four-year development process) that can be broken down into component parts, including its laser-welded steel frames, down cushions and wool upholstery. “Every part can be replaced; everything can be serviced or disposed of in the correct way,” he adds. “This is all with the intention of creating objects that can be kept in use, to principles of circular design and manufacturing.”

Not only can you expect Part & Whole to continue with this philosophy (its newest work, Chord, riffs on the colourful, rippling surfaces of 1970s sofa designs) but for boutique furniture-making to follow suit. “It’s a sector that makes objects that need a lot of specialised expertise. As a result, it hasn’t been able to move at the pace of other industries in terms of circularity and repairs,” says Ferguson. “But it’s going to start changing quite quickly.”
partandwhole.com

Mabeo Furniture
The designer as the middleman
Botswana

Gaborone-based designer Peter Mabeo is known for creating furniture inspired by Botswana’s rich craft tradition. But his approach hasn’t always been so rooted in his homeland’s culture. “Back when we started in the early 1990s, there was no historical reference to craft within the local commercial context,” says Mabeo. “My early work was about trying to meet someone’s expectations on boring, commercial projects.”

Convinced that there was a more inspiring way to practice in the southern African country, Mabeo (pictured) set a new agenda for his studio. “I decided to forget about that commercial way of working entirely and do something that felt more aligned with Botswana’s culture and the way we work.”

The result? A business model that has seen him act as a middleman of sorts, pairing his knowledge of local craftspeople’s skills with client briefs. And while Mabeo knows that this is good for the region’s creative industry, he stresses that it is financially savvy too. Today, Mabeo Furniture is a multidisciplinary company collaborating with the likes of Fendi and exporting southern African design globally. “The idea is not to help from the superior position that is often associated with design but to collaborate using design as a tool for mediation,” he says.

It is a reminder that furniture-makers don’t need to look to established business models. Instead, forging connections between local craft and clients can be a profitable way forwards too. 
mabeofurniture.com

Reframed
Flatpacking the future
Denmark

“I’m trying to make good design accessible because I believe that people’s lives are better when they’re surrounded by good interiors,” says Kasper Simonsen, founder of Copenhagen-based bed-maker Reframed. The firm has been working to spice things up in the bedroom since its foundation in 2021, offering smartly designed furniture at an accessible price point.

“I was living in London and my friends were buying flatpack furniture that wasn’t made on the continent, meaning that it would spend 40 weeks on a boat before coming to Europe,” says Simonsen. “Or if they were buying high-end designs, they would have to go to the retailers and wait eight weeks for delivery.” Reframed’s business model, Simonsen says, fights these inefficiencies.

Its bed frames are made from aluminium extrusions produced by Norsk Hydro in Sweden, whose clients include Rolls-Royce and which uses 82 per cent post-consumer recycled aluminium. They are then machined and powder-coated in Denmark. The lightweight frames are flatpacked and shipped to customers in less than a week; tension locks built into the frame ensure that the bed can be assembled in minutes, without screws.

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