The surprising sporting inspiration behind a ￡25,000 sofa destined for super-rich homes
For Shay Alkalay and Yael Mer, also known as the husband-and-wife design duo Raw Edges, inspiration can come from unusual places.
‘We’re not the kind of designers who look at artists or nature, and try to express whatever an artist was doing, or create something that’s related to animals,’ says Alkalay. ‘We’re really more into mathematics and geometry, invention and metaphysical elements. Often, we have study moments where we just take a break for a day or two, not to work on anything specific, but just to play around with mechanisms and ideas.’
‘We get inspiration from the inside rather than the outside,’ agrees Mer.
When it came to their latest pieces for Louis Vuitton’s Objets Nomades collection, this noodling around with ideas resulted in the Binda armchair and sofa, whose forms were derived, somewhat unexpectedly, from tennis balls.
‘Well, it wasn’t literally tennis balls,’ Alkalay clarifies. Rather, it was the distinctive geometric pattern of the seam that holds the two parts of the ball together. ‘Or you can take any ball really,’ he adds. ‘Basketballs, footballs… the geometry of creating a sphere from a flat material, often leather, it’s really fascinating.’
Their task was to take inspiration from such an every-day item and turn it into a luxurious piece of furniture, which they did initially by working with paper models, playing with the concept of streptohedrons – twisted geometric forms – until they came up with the sinuous, curved back of an armchair. ‘We didn’t know what the rest of the chair was going to look like at that point,’ explains Alkalay, ‘but we said, OK, that’s a chair for Louis Vuitton.’
The London-based designers, who met in Jerusalem and formed their studio after graduating from the Royal College of Art in 2007, have been working with Louis Vuitton since 2015, designing pieces for the brand’s Objets Nomades collection of furniture and accessories. Launched just over a decade ago, in 2012, the collection invites designers to take inspiration from travel and a nomadic lifestyle to create pieces that are, a little counter-intuitively, destined to remain in the home.
The first Objets Nomades were directly inspired by trunks and travel accessories; but since then the interpretations by the stable of designers that create it, who also include Patricia Urquiola and Marcel Wanders, have become somewhat more abstract – although they always reference the exquisite leatherwork that characterises Louis Vuitton. Previous Raw Edges pieces, for example, have included a chair, table and lamp named Concertina, inspired by collapsible, folding furniture; and Dolls, a collection of playful chairs in a range of bright colours and folk-inspired fabrics from around the world.
In the case of Binda, the idea was conceived in 2020, soon after the start of the pandemic, and took three years to bring to fruition in the form of the chair, involving much collaboration between the designers and the artisans at Louis Vuitton’s workshop in Italy.
‘That relationship was really important,’ comments Mer. ‘Sometimes when you speak with workshops, the makers will say they can’t do this or they can’t do that, but the artisans at the Louis Vuitton workshop are the opposite; they’re very open to suggestions, and the way they work with leather is incredible.
‘There is one woman in particular who has a special tool that she uses to stretch the leather – everywhere she goes, she’s stretching leather. She doesn’t speak English, but even though we don’t all speak the same language, if we have an idea, she just understands, because she understands the material so well.’
‘They get the challenge – they love it,’ agrees Alkalay. ‘As designers, we have no knowledge [of making], so sometimes we come with what might seem like a silly idea, but then they think about it, and find a way to do it. It can bring them new, fresh thinking.’
The challenge, in terms of production, was to retain within the final piece the spirit of the paper model that Mer and Alkalay had originally presented to the brand. ‘Paper has this magic of expressing something so simple and nice, so the biggest challenge was to translate it into a functional object that you can sit on, without losing the geometry of the design,’ says Alkalay.
‘It needs to have just the right amount of softness,’ adds Mer. ‘We want it to hold the body as nicely as possible.’
After much back and forth, the chair was finalised – at which point, says Mer, the feeling was, ‘Well, if we’re doing an armchair, we need a sofa too.’ Happily, stretching the design from a chair to a sofa was a far simpler process, taking only a few days: ‘It was like an extrusion. We’d worked a lot on the details already, so it was just about stretching it and making it feel comfortable and look great.’
Both the chair and the sofa have handmade wooden frames and moulded foam padding. The back is upholstered in leather – stretched to perfection – the front in velvet, and the two are connected by a contrast piping. ‘In terms of the leather details, the piping was really important to us, coming again from the design of the tennis ball, the stitching that binds the two parts together,’ says Alkalay. ‘That’s where Binda, the name of the chair and sofa, came from.’
The fabrics can be specified in custom colours but have so far been produced in a choice of five, with white or red piping – cream, aubergine, bright blue, dark green and an orangey red that Alkalay describes as ‘vintage in feel, like those schoolbags people used to have in the ’80s.’
The talent that he and Mer share is to take inspiration from everyday objects – schoolbags, tennis balls – and create luxurious, cutting-edge pieces that will find their place in the most stylish contemporary homes. Interestingly, neither designer is a particular fan of either playing or watching tennis.
‘But we have a dog, and she loves tennis balls,’ says Mer.
‘She likes to tear them apart,’ adds Alkalay. ‘Imagine what she would try to do if we had this sofa at home…’
From ￡25,100, Louis Vuitton; Hair and make-up: Patrizio Lio at S Management, using IT Cosmetics and Kevin Murphy