We are excited to be able to share with you that renowned flatweave company Roger Oates Design are the new custodians of Solidwool. Although the ownership of the company has changed, some things remain constant; a love for design, a passion for wool and its value and our commitment to creating beautiful materials without compromising our planet.
With some help from Justin, we are working hard behind the scenes to further develop the Solidwool material and are well underway designing a new series of Hembury chairs which is proving an exciting and experimental journey.
With just a few last hurdles to overcome, we look forward to sharing the Hembury chair with you once again in the coming months. We want to make it perfect…or rather perfectly individual, which we think is even better!
Thank you all for your continued interest, support and patience, it really is a driving force. We are as enthusiastic as you are to relaunch. So, here’s to the next chapter, we’ll be sure to keep you updated.
Team Solidwool
An Update
From the Founders
Following our last post back in January things have (understandably) been a little quiet, but we have some good news to share and an exciting announcement for Solidwool. Firstly, thanks to everyone who took the time to write to us and also to the many of you who expressed an interest in taking Solidwool on.
For us closing the doors to the factory was a personal decision and never about selling out. It was about admitting that the waves of life can change how you want to live your life. Tough as it was, we knew that running Solidwool was not for us anymore.
Thanks to all of the interest, what quickly became apparent was despite this, we would have an opportunity to find someone with the resources to continue what we had started and move Solidwool on to realise its potential.
From initial conversations, one interested company stood out from the beginning and we are pleased to share that we believe we have found a new home for Solidwool that is a great fit. Where there is a team who value craft, materiality, design and soul as much as we did.
So this is us handing over to them. They will make the perfect home for Solidwool and the material, products and brand are a great fit with their product, processes and company ethos. Development and production will remain fairly local to us and we are so excited to see where they take things. So much so, that we are sticking around for the time being with Justin overseeing work on a new chair and material development.
So here’s to hoping that you stick around too and you give them every bit of support and love that you showed to us. Once the dust has settled the new Solidwool team will be able to share even more with you. Exciting times are ahead.
Hannah & Justin.
Solidwool to provide seating at the upcoming wastED pop-up at Selfridges
Selfridges London, will partner with Dan Barber and the team behind New York's internationally acclaimed Blue Hill restaurants to bring their ground-breaking food waste pop-up, wastED, to London for the first time.
Opening on the 24th February, they are taking up residence on Selfridge London's iconic rooftop for a month long pop-up.
The aim is to celebrate what chefs do every day on their menus (and traditional food cultures have done for thousands of years): creating something delicious out of the ignored or un-coveted and encouraging new applications for what we now all too commonly refer to as food waste.
The menu will feature ingredients such as cabbage cores, cover-crop sprouts and waste-fed pigs and offer reinterpretations of a few iconic British dishes.
For those booking the private dining area, they will be able to enjoy their meal seated on our finest Hembury Chairs made with under valued 'waste' Herdwick wool.
The restaurant will be open for lunch, dinner and afternoon tea. The menu will feature small plates to share, all price at £15. The not-so-customary afternoon tea will begin at £32.
When: 24th February - 2nd April
More information can be found at www.wastEDlondon.com.
A landmark moment.
Ring the bell.
This week, we shipped Hembury Chair number 100.
It’s currently on it’s way across the Atlantic to a lucky owner called Amy.
It’s a landmark moment for us.
A century of chairs.
One hundred seats for one hundred bottoms.
Each of these chairs is unique and made with an undervalued wool from the Lake District. The wool of the iconic Herdwick sheep.
It’s taken us just over a year to sell 100 chairs. And boy, have we learnt a lot during that time.
.............
As makers, the objects we create embody our ideas and beliefs. Our products capture a moment in time.
For us, the Hembury Chair was our way of showcasing Solidwool. It gave the material a voice, a way of telling our story and the hope we had for the material.
It’s hard to say how many we will make of this first chair, but it’s almost certain that by this time next year the mould, and the design as it stands today, will no longer be in service.
In order to keep moving forward, we want to develop the material and our manufacturing processes. We want to build a small, empowered team of makers at the Solidwool factory. This will require a step up in production capabilities all round.
Our goal is to create a 100% natural wool composite. And by doing this, bring you the story of other wool's that are undervalued. To continue creating products which inspire and are made to cherish.
Your dreams should scare you after all.
What this means though is that one day we’ll be able to look back on this first Solidwool chair and know that only a few hundred people were lucky enough to own one.
Craft is the new luxury.
So if you want to get yourself a piece of Solidwool history, then you had better be quick.
"A chair is the first thing you need when you don't really need anything"
- Ralph Caplan, American Design Critic
Inspiration: Jean Prouvé
About 9 years ago we were at the Design Museum in London. We saw there was an exhibition about a designer called Jean Prouvé and so thought we’d take a look.
Prouvé was a French metal worker. A self-taught architect and designer. He used design and innovation to take industrial manufacturing processes into new areas. He was key in introducing a more industrial construction and aesthetic to the interior world.
Design to him was not a novelty. He felt you could not call yourself a designer unless you knew how to make the things you drew. He had his own workshop and later his own factory.
It was this exhibition and Prouvé’s blending of materials, manufacturing processes and production, all design led, that really inspired us and set us on a pathway to creating Solidwool.
On the left, a Solidwool dozen. On the right, a Jean Prouvé Cite lounge chair.
This month British Design Critic and writer for the International New York Times, Alice Rawsthorn posted a series of 7 posts on her Instagram feed, talking about Jean Prouvé. Each of the posts and a link to the stories are below:
1. Describing himself as “an anarchist in a good way”, Prouvé was passionately committed to the modernist ideal of using design and industrialisation to improve the lives of the masses. More...
2. After leaving school school at the age of 15, Jean Prouvé was apprenticed for five years to Parisian metalworkers, first Emile Robert, then Szabo. More...
3. When World War II began, Jean Prouvé’s workshop switched to military production by designing prefabricated barracks for the French army. More...
4. Designer, architect, artisan, engineer, manufacturer, entrepreneur. Jean Prouve fulfilled all of those roles, but preferred to describe himself as a "factory worker". More...
5. Losing his beloved factory in Maxéville was a dreadful blow for Jean Prouvé. His family tried to distract him with a new project to design and build a house where he would live. More...
6. Like his father Victor, who co-founded the École de Nancy group of artists, designers and makers, Jean Prouvé forged firm friendships with his peers and fellow modernist pioneers. More...
7. There can be no doubt about Jean Prouvé's objectives for his work. Throughout his life he strove to fulfil his father Victor's dream of deploying "industrial production for the widest possible public". More...
“If people understand, there’s no need to explain. If they don’t, there’s no use explaining.”