Writer: Gem Barton
Devon based contemporary furniture design duo Dave Young & Ross Norgate talk to Futurespace about how their location inspires their work and who does what in the workshop!
ROLES + IDEAS
Coming from different backgrounds has meant that we have naturally fallen into our prospective roles. Ross spends most of his time on the bench and a lot of my time at the desktop. However there are still plenty of crossovers, which is one of the joys of the job as it keeps it so varied.
Every project is unique in how we approach it. More often than not it depends on what it is on the slate, as to how we tackle it. When it comes to the collection pieces, I will conceptualise and Ross will make it work. Between us we make sure it fits the aesthetic requirement as well as the constructional integrity.
MATERIALS + PROTOTYPING
After a series of sketches the design takes shape in the form of an architectural drawing. We are fairly old school with our approach using pencil and paper a lot of the time, although we are starting to experiment with digital. There’s just something about drawing with pencil that is so immediate. Again with the modeling, this is all done by hand crafting scaled or full size models out of timber, cardboard or whatever else we have knocking around the workshop. It usually takes a couple of goes to get exactly where we want to be with each piece.
The majority of our work is in timber and we are lucky enough to have a timber yard just down the road, which stocks quality FSC certified planks. This makes it easy for us to hand select the timbers, getting hold of premium boards and minimising waste in terms of sapwood.
DEVON
Devon gives us the headspace to focus on ideas with very little interference. Although we do like to travel us much as we can, we are not dictated by trends or fashion. We’re lucky to work in an environment that affords us time and freedom to explore ideas.
