A new furniture for you

Nicholas Gardner, creative and functional products for the market

Nicholas is a London-based designer, and recent Royal College of Art graduate. His studio New Furniture For You creates functional products for the market; intended for a parallel, hyper-real consumer space. A highly-referential world where reproductions and iterations of classic typologies and archetypes are removed from their source material; rendering a new set of aesthetic values, that are arguably a much closer representation of our ‘desires’. These examples reveal truths, inconsistencies and functional rationalities about modern consumer tastes and culture. Drawing from (post)internet, DIY and corporate culture his work often employs a forceful intersection between cheaply produced ready-mades and components with a polished design sensibility.

MOULDINGS
This project is an exploration of the misuse of a modern raw material (such as  timber profiles found at any DIY superstore) and the cultural and sculptural conclusions that can be made from exploring this phenomenon, with the aim of imparting a new form on these materials.

Hydro Dipz
with James Shaw
August 2014

Hydrographic Transfer is a process similar to marbling where a printed pattern floated on water can be applied to a solid object by dipping it in. Typically the process is used by gun enthusiasts and boy racers for creating custom finishes on favourite machines. In this collection they wanted to explore the materiality of the process in terms of the transformation that a micro veneer of a ‘material’ can create, thus we laminated steel beams with walnut bur, lumps of concrete with carbon fibre and glass tube with coolflames. The range was produced for an exhibition titled ‘The Future of Workspace’ .

Corporate Marble

Looking at the vast corporate foyers of Liverpool Street, clad with back-lit Carrara marble, these pieces reference the forceful use of this symbolically luxury material. Marble slabs, cracked and folded, are forced into impossible and precarious shapes. The pieces are constructed by applying glass fibre and Jesmonite resin behind the joining planes of marble.

A symbol of permanency and geological authenticity, Marble is used as a tool to inspire confidence in clients and potential investors. These vacuous and excessive spaces, derived from a Modernist formula, are informed by professional conduct.