“Leftover” Corian Recast as Collection of Modern Furniture

Architizer News

“Leftover” Corian Recast as Collection of Modern Furniture

August 6, 2012

Images courtesy of Leo Torri for DuPont™ Corian®

Corian launched its new Dupont Corian color line at the Milan Design Week 2012 with a themed exhibition that celebrated the “Corian Colour Evolution. Participating in the show were four creative design firms from around Europe, each of which worked with a different color palette to develop new, unique conceptual creations. For his part, UK-based designer Rabih Hage proposed the creation of a new series of furniture made from the “leftovers” of the new colours of Dupont line.

Hage had access to a range of colors, as diverse as muted shades “Light Ash”, “Absolute Beige” and “Noble Ecru” to more intense hues “Blooming Green” and “Imperial Yellow”. By stacking the planks linearly and then shaping the glutinative whole, he has wrought layered, textural volumes out of the off-cuts and discarded samples. The resultant pieces, which include tables, chairs and even shelving units, have a enticing sedimentary quality about them, as if they had been hewn from some Skittle-mountain.

“I have always been fascinated by unused material or discarded cuts of stone, wood or metal whether cheap or expensive,” Hage explains, continuing, “Reusing these materials as a luxury product and treating the off-cuts as something precious is my real motivation.” He says that the aesthetic properties of the spent Corian reminded him of antique patina pieces, carefully weathered and tastefully chipped as they were by time. One cannot simply replicate designs like these says Hage:”To get closer to this authenticity I regard the random layering of off-cuts as a noble design gesture and authentic in the building of my new designs. . . .Imperfection is beauty; a discarded material is as noble and precious as a newly polished stone.”