S
Sam Frew
Guest
- Thread Author
- #1
To design a piece of furniture is often to battle a series of conflicting surfaces, complicated where one turns into the other. On a chair, that point is, in Aalto’s words, the knee — the place where the backrest transitions into the rear leg and where, in some cases, a wood grain shifts from horizontal to vertical. That same spot where every teenager who has ever lived has tipped backward to conduct their very own, robust structural assessment.
For a table, it is where the top and the leg marry. The joint where functionality and stability drive the design direction for the rest of the piece. In both instances, these physical moments can quite literally make or break a product. Designed well, they are rarely noticed; designed poorly, and you can be left with a wobbly top, a creaky seat and an unhappy user.
Enter Tiago and K90, a chair and a training table designed to perfection by studio KASCHKASCH for and with Davis Furniture.
KASCHKASCH designed The Tiago Collection to support hospitality, workplace, dining and collaborative environments with lasting versatility and craftsmanship.
Florian Kallus and Sebastian Schneider founded their studio in Cologne in 2011, two trained cabinetmakers who went on to study product design. They describe what they do as stripping design “down to the bare essentials,” which for fifteen years they have done for the likes of Hay, Normann Copenhagen and Marset. This year marks a new era for the duo: Tiago and K90 are their first designs to launch in the United States.
Davis Furniture, on the other hand, is a fourth-generation family company that has made furniture in High Point, North Carolina since 1944. They’ve done it all, and this latest collaboration with KASCHKASCH feels instinctive. Both collections grew out of a collaborative back-and-forth between the studio in Cologne and Davis’s product development and manufacturing teams in High Point, a partnership Danny Davis, the company’s president, calls “rooted in a shared respect for craft and a belief in purposeful design.”
Schneider remembers the first visit less for the factory than for the people: “You sometimes work on a project for several years, and at times very intensively, so it’s no fun at all if you don’t get on.” His verdict on the existing Davis range mirrors the belief the two hold about themselves: “Not too much and not too little. That’s exactly what we always try to achieve.”
Here is the thing: in contract furniture, the market asks for less. It asks for slimmer profiles and minimal materials, because we’ve learned to read lightness as refinement. It asks for lighter weights and adjustable parts, because adaptability is viewed as more valuable than a firstborn. Yet at the same time, the market needs robustness.
Furniture designed for contract environments must withstand the demands of daily use, with durability and longevity built into how it is engineered and manufactured. Those practical demands have little interest in elegance and fluent design language, which often require more. So how do you make a piece of furniture that is visibly less, and yet still show that it is enough?
Designed by KASCHKASCH, K90 is a refined training table collection defined by its sculptural steel leg and clean material expression.
For a training table like K90, the considerations usually come down to the technical components. How does the cable management work? How easily does the top flip? These questions have been answered within K90, and they have been answered well.
Horizontal wire management is concealed within a metal trough beneath the surface, while a vertical magnetic panel discreetly organizes cables from table to floor within the leg. Power access is intentionally positioned at the edges of the tabletop, preserving an uninterrupted central work area, and the flip-top mechanism allows the surface to rotate a full 90 degrees for compact nesting and efficient storage – a defining gesture that informs the name K90.
K90 is designed to support flexible learning and collaborative environments with intuitive mobility and compact nesting capabilities.
But these features have also been considered beyond their functionality. With K90, Davis Furniture and KASCHKASCH present a training table that balances technical precision with material expression. It is this that makes K90 more.
A standard training table stands on a cast aluminum T, robust but not exactly inspiring, yet K90 settles on “very slim cross-sections,” its sculptural leg formed from a slender flat steel profile that is inspired by the poised stance of a ballerina, for a sense of lightness and balance while maintaining the durability required for high-performance settings.
In Kallus’s words, “a single sweep from the base almost all the way up to the underside of the tabletop,” bent, not cast, and splayed at the foot to meet the casters, so that they “channel the weight from the outside toward the center, both structurally and visually.” This central panel is not only structural, but also an extension of the table’s material language — offered in the same surface options as the top; so too is the integrated wire-management panel, allowing the finish to carry seamlessly from horizontal to vertical planes.
The Tiago Collection is a refined multi-purpose chair and barstool series.
For Tiago, the studio wanted something seemingly simple but in reality quite rare: “an incredibly comfortable wooden seating series.” The concept was a meeting of a molded plywood back and solid leg. “The most important design feature was the transition from the rear leg to the backrest, which had to take the form of a soft, flowing curve and be visually appealing from every angle.” From behind, the solid oak leg tapers as it rises and resolves directly into the molded back, so that leg and back read as a single drawn line. Singing from the same (though more contemporary) hymn sheet as Thonet’s hoop leg design of 1859’s No. 14.
At the front, the ends of the shell turn down into the tops of the legs in a soft U, and the moment where veneered plywood gives way to solid oak is left in plain view. Its silhouette is shaped by an interplay of soft curvature and clean linear transitions.
The studio went as far as the materials would let it. Kallus says they “pushed 2D veneer to its absolute limits,” which is to say tighter radii than the material likes, without the three-dimensional veneer that many shell chairs now rely on and pushed the cross-sections of the chair’s legs and frame “to the minimum.”
It’s a risky route, and it is where the collaboration was tested. “The standards of the American market were new to us,” Schneider says, “and we first had to familiarize ourselves with the load tests before working with the engineers to find suitable solutions. After all, Tiago wasn’t meant to be too bulky, but to remain as slim as possible.” The joint that begins every chair’s structural challenge here becomes central to the design’s expression.
Details of a chair from The Tiago Collection, a series crafted from solid oak and molded plywood.
Getting there was a transatlantic exercise. The engineers are Davis’ own, and Tiago went from sketch to full-scale prototype and back more than once. “Tiago reflects a highly disciplined approach to construction, where the relationship between components defines the overall expression,” said Rob Easton, Vice President of Design and Development at Davis Furniture. “From the joinery to the transition between solid wood and molded plywood, every decision contributes to a chair that feels both resolved and intuitive in use.”
On K90, every component — the bent leg, the caster junction, the cable panel — was prototyped and refined the same way: drawings from Cologne, test results from North Carolina, until each piece could be built, tested and built again. Kallus, who counts Davis among the most professional companies the studio has worked with in fifteen years, says that input “had a huge impact on the final result.”
Both objects are restrained and considered in their delivery, and that is absolutely by design. The studio says a comfortable chair should feel “so natural that you almost forget it’s there,” and the same is true of a training table that flips away without a fuss to settle into the background. In both instances, restraint is not the absence of a decision. It is a decision made, with a specific impression in mind, and presented to be tried and tested without a modicum of concern.
For the full Tiago and K90 collections, visit davisfurniture.com.
The post Resolved at the Joint: KASCHKASCH’s Tiago and K90 Are a Study in Furniture’s Hardest Transitions appeared first on Journal.
For a table, it is where the top and the leg marry. The joint where functionality and stability drive the design direction for the rest of the piece. In both instances, these physical moments can quite literally make or break a product. Designed well, they are rarely noticed; designed poorly, and you can be left with a wobbly top, a creaky seat and an unhappy user.
Enter Tiago and K90, a chair and a training table designed to perfection by studio KASCHKASCH for and with Davis Furniture.
The Cologne Studio Meets High Point
KASCHKASCH designed The Tiago Collection to support hospitality, workplace, dining and collaborative environments with lasting versatility and craftsmanship.
Florian Kallus and Sebastian Schneider founded their studio in Cologne in 2011, two trained cabinetmakers who went on to study product design. They describe what they do as stripping design “down to the bare essentials,” which for fifteen years they have done for the likes of Hay, Normann Copenhagen and Marset. This year marks a new era for the duo: Tiago and K90 are their first designs to launch in the United States.
Davis Furniture, on the other hand, is a fourth-generation family company that has made furniture in High Point, North Carolina since 1944. They’ve done it all, and this latest collaboration with KASCHKASCH feels instinctive. Both collections grew out of a collaborative back-and-forth between the studio in Cologne and Davis’s product development and manufacturing teams in High Point, a partnership Danny Davis, the company’s president, calls “rooted in a shared respect for craft and a belief in purposeful design.”
Schneider remembers the first visit less for the factory than for the people: “You sometimes work on a project for several years, and at times very intensively, so it’s no fun at all if you don’t get on.” His verdict on the existing Davis range mirrors the belief the two hold about themselves: “Not too much and not too little. That’s exactly what we always try to achieve.”
Here is the thing: in contract furniture, the market asks for less. It asks for slimmer profiles and minimal materials, because we’ve learned to read lightness as refinement. It asks for lighter weights and adjustable parts, because adaptability is viewed as more valuable than a firstborn. Yet at the same time, the market needs robustness.
Furniture designed for contract environments must withstand the demands of daily use, with durability and longevity built into how it is engineered and manufactured. Those practical demands have little interest in elegance and fluent design language, which often require more. So how do you make a piece of furniture that is visibly less, and yet still show that it is enough?
K90: The Training Table Reworked
Designed by KASCHKASCH, K90 is a refined training table collection defined by its sculptural steel leg and clean material expression.
For a training table like K90, the considerations usually come down to the technical components. How does the cable management work? How easily does the top flip? These questions have been answered within K90, and they have been answered well.
Horizontal wire management is concealed within a metal trough beneath the surface, while a vertical magnetic panel discreetly organizes cables from table to floor within the leg. Power access is intentionally positioned at the edges of the tabletop, preserving an uninterrupted central work area, and the flip-top mechanism allows the surface to rotate a full 90 degrees for compact nesting and efficient storage – a defining gesture that informs the name K90.
K90 is designed to support flexible learning and collaborative environments with intuitive mobility and compact nesting capabilities.
But these features have also been considered beyond their functionality. With K90, Davis Furniture and KASCHKASCH present a training table that balances technical precision with material expression. It is this that makes K90 more.
A standard training table stands on a cast aluminum T, robust but not exactly inspiring, yet K90 settles on “very slim cross-sections,” its sculptural leg formed from a slender flat steel profile that is inspired by the poised stance of a ballerina, for a sense of lightness and balance while maintaining the durability required for high-performance settings.
In Kallus’s words, “a single sweep from the base almost all the way up to the underside of the tabletop,” bent, not cast, and splayed at the foot to meet the casters, so that they “channel the weight from the outside toward the center, both structurally and visually.” This central panel is not only structural, but also an extension of the table’s material language — offered in the same surface options as the top; so too is the integrated wire-management panel, allowing the finish to carry seamlessly from horizontal to vertical planes.
A Chair Resolved at the Joint
The Tiago Collection is a refined multi-purpose chair and barstool series.
For Tiago, the studio wanted something seemingly simple but in reality quite rare: “an incredibly comfortable wooden seating series.” The concept was a meeting of a molded plywood back and solid leg. “The most important design feature was the transition from the rear leg to the backrest, which had to take the form of a soft, flowing curve and be visually appealing from every angle.” From behind, the solid oak leg tapers as it rises and resolves directly into the molded back, so that leg and back read as a single drawn line. Singing from the same (though more contemporary) hymn sheet as Thonet’s hoop leg design of 1859’s No. 14.
At the front, the ends of the shell turn down into the tops of the legs in a soft U, and the moment where veneered plywood gives way to solid oak is left in plain view. Its silhouette is shaped by an interplay of soft curvature and clean linear transitions.
The studio went as far as the materials would let it. Kallus says they “pushed 2D veneer to its absolute limits,” which is to say tighter radii than the material likes, without the three-dimensional veneer that many shell chairs now rely on and pushed the cross-sections of the chair’s legs and frame “to the minimum.”
It’s a risky route, and it is where the collaboration was tested. “The standards of the American market were new to us,” Schneider says, “and we first had to familiarize ourselves with the load tests before working with the engineers to find suitable solutions. After all, Tiago wasn’t meant to be too bulky, but to remain as slim as possible.” The joint that begins every chair’s structural challenge here becomes central to the design’s expression.
From Cologne to North Carolina, and Back
Details of a chair from The Tiago Collection, a series crafted from solid oak and molded plywood.
Getting there was a transatlantic exercise. The engineers are Davis’ own, and Tiago went from sketch to full-scale prototype and back more than once. “Tiago reflects a highly disciplined approach to construction, where the relationship between components defines the overall expression,” said Rob Easton, Vice President of Design and Development at Davis Furniture. “From the joinery to the transition between solid wood and molded plywood, every decision contributes to a chair that feels both resolved and intuitive in use.”
On K90, every component — the bent leg, the caster junction, the cable panel — was prototyped and refined the same way: drawings from Cologne, test results from North Carolina, until each piece could be built, tested and built again. Kallus, who counts Davis among the most professional companies the studio has worked with in fifteen years, says that input “had a huge impact on the final result.”
Both objects are restrained and considered in their delivery, and that is absolutely by design. The studio says a comfortable chair should feel “so natural that you almost forget it’s there,” and the same is true of a training table that flips away without a fuss to settle into the background. In both instances, restraint is not the absence of a decision. It is a decision made, with a specific impression in mind, and presented to be tried and tested without a modicum of concern.
For the full Tiago and K90 collections, visit davisfurniture.com.
The post Resolved at the Joint: KASCHKASCH’s Tiago and K90 Are a Study in Furniture’s Hardest Transitions appeared first on Journal.