The Blushing Bar

A deep pink circular bar is set to take centre stage at the Wallpaper* Handmade X: With Love exhibition, designed by architects Chan + Eayrs and made out of red oak by Sebastian Cox. This experimental piece has been created to answer the brief of X set by the team at the magazine to celebrate 10 years of its showcase in Milan.

Design Process

“We interpreted X as both ‘10’, for Wallpaper* Handmade’s 10th anniversary, but also a kiss for love, hence the name and colour of the bar. Love makes one blush, and the heart pound; increasing blood circulation through the body through our veins,” says Merlin Eayrs. “Red oak has a pinkish flesh-like hue, and a porous nature which has capillaries/veins so open you can blow through a short section. These wood veins have been pumped through with deep pink dye by Sebastian Cox, like blood-filled veins through love struck flesh.”

Zoe Chan adds: “The bar is a place of connection, a focal point for coming together. It feels very personal, much like the projects we tend to take on.”

“Normally a bar is linear and acts a bit like a barrier, by making it circular it becomes a more interactive and engaging place where you are a participant but there’s also an element of theatre about it” says Merlin Eayrs. 

“We wanted to break down the concept of the bar,” says Zoe Chan (the other half of Chan + Eayrs), “and divide up its different functions into ten components that come together to form a whole.” So the Blushing Bar will have an area for alcohol, another for soft drinks, yet another for chopping up citrus fruit, and so on. There’s even a sink and a tap, all rigorously made out of red oak of course, though the bits of timber that are in constant contact with water have been thermally treated, making the timber much more dimensionally stable in a wet environment, and the tap has been lined with flexible plastic hose and given an elegant brass end. 

With its sculptural external facades and sensuous carved feet, the bar combines sculptural qualities with functionality, while celebrating the unique properties of the timber it is made of. “Red oak is an incredibly open-grained porous material,” says Sebastian Cox. “When you shave a thin slice of it and put it against the light, you get this beautiful dappled effect through the xylum and its distinctly large spring growth.”

Red oak’s sustainability story also has a strong appeal for Sebastian, and for Merlin Eayrs of architects, interior designers and makers Chan and Eayrs, who designed the bar.

“As a business, we don’t select a raw material primarily on price, or workability or even aesthetics. We’re concerned first and foremost with what the resource is.  What materials is the world offering us? Which resource needs to be used?” said Sebastian. “There are now 10 billion of us and we need to be concerned with how we share and shape our environment. We can’t go on using these superficial criteria for what we want. We have to be guided by what the earth provides.” Chan & Eayrs support this statement. “I think having a child has brought it home to me even more and made me really re-evaluate our products and priorities,” he said. “We use as much renewable, natural raw material and design as responsibly as possible. We also try to celebrate these materials, expressing them to let them shine through and detailing them in interesting ways. It’s about making sustainability appeal through beauty.”

Making

Furniture designer-maker Sebastian Cox of Sebastian Cox Ltd delights in exploring the potential of timber. He takes it to its apparent technical and creative limits. Then he pushes the boundaries that bit further to see what happens. The results have already been remarkable. He has steamed and bent wood into incredible forms and created natural mouldable furniture by blending mycelium fungus with green wood waste and training it to grow around a timber template. 

Never before, however, has Sebastian Cox Ltd pressure injected red calligraphy ink into the inner structure of American red oak, so that it works its way to the surface to pick out and enhance the beautiful grain – until now. The objective of this timber transfusion was to create the raw material for a 3m diameter circular bar, one of the 2019 Wallpaper* Handmade design pieces for the Milan design week, the famed Fuorisalone.

The timber is hugely popular in the U.S., employed for everything from flooring to furniture, staircases to cladding. It can also be used structurally and, given a protective treatment, in exterior applications. 

"It’s robust and works and machines well and it looks beautiful. It’s said people might be deterred by the word red. But at most it’s a gentle russet – it's a warm, inviting wood.” said Sebastian Cox. “We wanted to accentuate the natural patterning of the wood, but in a subtle light-touch way.”

The concept of injecting colour into the actual fibres of the timber, he added, came about during the best part of a month spent just examining, handling and working the material. “We became fixated on the size of the xylum and phloem vessels. They’re exceptionally large, with only sycamore and beech in my knowledge coming close. You can virtually count the number of pores in the end grain. It doesn’t compromise the strength of the wood, but it does make it porous and so unsuitable for some applications white oak is used for – whiskey barrels, for example!”

Once the creative team had decided on the approach, however, it wasn’t just a case of filling a giant hypodermic with red ink. There was some trial and error.

“We considered using wood dye, but it was too viscous to pass easily through the vessels, so we opted for the water-based calligraphy ink, which also gives a richer, more intense red,” said Sebastian. “We also tried impregnating it in a vacuum bag press, but the ink just spilled out.”

After the injection with compressed air method was established, there were also a few issues with getting the pressure right. The evidence is there to see on the Woolwich workshop walls in the shape of red ink ‘blood spatters’. “Eventually we settled on 10 bar and found the ink worked its way through the length and width of the boards most evenly if we injected it into shallow, routed ‘domino’ recesses in the ends,” said Sebastian.

The Blushing Bar comprises 60 oak front sections and 120 leg components, but the making team became very adept at the process and were able to inject a 650mm long, two inch (or eight quarter in American hardwood parlance) piece in just five minutes. And a video will be shown alongside the bar in Milan to demonstrate to visitors just how it was done. The ink finds its easiest route through the timber, which means it migrates naturally to the less dense spring growth. The result is that the fine rings of this material are highlighted in red on the surface, while the denser summer growth is left uncoloured. The effect is accentuated by using crown cut boards, rather than quarter sawn, where the end grain is more pronounced and the contrast between the spring and summer material stands out more clearly.

After coloring, the timber was dried to a stable 10% moisture content before being shaped and machined. For ultra precision this included working the curved pieces on a CNC machine, a tool which might come as a something of a surprise to find at such a craft-oriented operation. The bar is made up of 10 interlocking wedge-shaped sections, celebrating 10 years of Wallpaper Handmade design collaborations and creating a perfect ‘O’.

The individual bar sections also each performs a different function. There’s a chopping and preparation area, a storage unit for bottles, even a sink in water-resistant, thermo-treated red oak, further highlighting the versatility of the timber. Each section was set for two weeks in specially designed jigs, which were, said Merlin, ‘as much things of beauty as the finished bar itself’.

The last stage of the process was to apply a very lightly pigmented, specially mixed oil blend to the wood to subtly emphasise further the contrast between inked and naturally coloured areas.

“Like most of our work, it’s not designed to be a one off,” Cox said. “We’re confident the inking process is scalable and could go into commercial application.”

Partners

Chan & Eayrs

@chanandeayrs

Chan and Eayrs are a husband and wife duo of trained architects who create individually crafted homes from scratch. Eschewing the traditional role of an architect, Zoe and Merlin get personally involved in every aspect of each project, from finding the site right down to choosing individual furnishings. Their roles as investors, creatives and craftsmen of each project mean they retain complete, uncompromised creative freedom to bring their visions to life.

This unique practice allows them to ‘feel’ their spaces, an emotional process that is emblematic of their work. They camp or live in their empty sites to understand the context, light, volumes and temperature of the spaces, and travel to find objects, materials and inspiration. By consciously making just one home at a time, every project is a journey, reflecting the couple’s current interest in a place, their influences, interests in materials and methods of making and connecting to nature and the elements.

Sebastian Cox Ltd

@sebastiancoxltd

Sebastian Cox is a furniture designer, maker and environmentalist based in south London. Sebastian founded his workshop and design studio in 2010 on the principle that the past can be used to design and make the future. 

He is deeply motivated by the way generations of craftsmen have used a limited palette of biodegradable and renewable materials, extracted from the land in a responsible and connected way.  Cox produces his own collections of furniture, lighting and home accessories and collaborates with other material experts, brands, interior designers, manufacturers and retailers who share his vision for a better, more engaged, material future. 

He has been labelled as one of the most influential designers in London by the London Evening Standard and listed amongst Forbes’ 30 under 30 to watch. His work has received a Design Guild Mark alongside other accolades from design publications including Elle Decoration, Homes & Gardens and EKKB.

Source: American Hardwood Export Council