British designer Faye Toogood unveiled a new furniture collection at Milan Design Week last week. The Roly Poly collection features plump dish shaped seats and smooth round tables, set on chunky legs and all made in fibreglass for strength and durability. Toogood references the ‘comforting dairy hues of mid-century Bakelite’, but they remind me of small moulded plastic chairs from my childhood. She says:
Chairs, tables and daybeds acquire a rounded, welcoming chunkiness, with wide legs and gently linear forms, while the popular Elements Table is reinterpreted as a ludic interplay of voids and feminine curves. Each of the new pieces has been developed as a clay maquette before being rendered in layered fibreglass, chosen as a medium for its tensile strength and sculptural qualities. Surfaces are polished smooth in places, left raw and untreated in others; the resultant textural dialogue is carried across into hand-woven yarn throws and the graphic, contoured Play tapestry – an abstract image derived from an infant’s building blocks.
Images: Faye Toogood
