Burnt Cork Furniture Collection by Noé Duchaufour-Lawrance.

Like a phoenix rising from the ashes, French designer Noé Duchaufour-Lawrance’s second instalment for Made in Situ pays tribute to the resilience of material, people and process through the use of discarded burnt cork.

A deeply personal collection, Noé was inspired by his own visceral encounter driving through forest fires on his move to Portugal in 2017. The experience brought him closer to this new landscape and fostered a desire to design a furniture collection that contains and exhibits the marks of its history. Through expressions of regeneration from material to process a new creation from the fires was born.

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From rawness to fluid curves, this collection plays with dichotomies. Discarded burnt cork is transformed into custom gradient blocks, then carved to reveal tactile & sculptural creations. Working with a family company to create the blocks by hand and an industrial company to carve the organic forms by machine, a natural tension between tradition and high tech evolved into an expression of newness and beauty.

A defined gradient of coarse and fine cork granules guides the structure of the design. Flowing upwards, raw graduation from natural catastrophe to fluid anthropomorphic curves forms the story of the phoenix rising from the ashes. The pure form of the granulated block is purposefully visible in the furniture with the charcoal burnt cork present at the base.

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Every aspect of tactility and inclination was carefully considered, as the Made in Situ team elaborates. “These pieces invite one to experience the material transition at every angle. The distances between the vertical blocks impede or favour the passage of light, a movement ever-present in structure and stillness. This tension in perpendicularity is the expression of the collection. The horizontal culmination of all the pieces reveals their use, softly inviting interaction with the human body.”

The stool, the smallest piece of the collection best crystallizes the essence of the collection. Perched on three legs, it gradually morphs from visibly burnt cork into an organic top. Each piece playfully balances the structural rough blocks of the base with the soft fluidity of the uppermost surface, architecturally juxtaposing the vertical and horizontal planes.

[Images courtesy of Made in Situ. Photography by Nuno Sousa Dias.]