Furniture Design: Piet Hein Eek's making furniture, made of furniture, made of furniture

Date
8 January 2014

Piet Hein Eek already has an international reputation for creating furniture from waste material. He made his name in the 1990s for producing products built entirely from discarded materials too expensive to be turned into anything else. His frustration with this situation stemmed from the fact that the materials were thrown away not because they were of no use, but because the cost of labour was too great to make the finished products economically viable.

Flying in the face of commercial logic he’s been successfully selling his expensive recycled products to customers who appreciate their intricacy for over a decade. Now he’s taking the process one step further, creating furniture from the offcuts of his own workshop, meaning his objects are twice-recycled and no materials go to waste.

Waste Waste 40×40 is a collection made up of these offcuts fashioned into 40mm x 40mm pieces and arranged as a skin over a pre-fabricated structure. The benches, tables and chairs are therefore unique, their composite parts retaining paints and laquers left over from their previous iterations, offering the finished products a beautiful pixellated quality.

Above

Piet Hein Eek: Waste Waste 40×40

Above

Piet Hein Eek: Waste Waste 40×40

Above

Piet Hein Eek: Waste Waste 40×40

Above

Piet Hein Eek: Waste Waste 40×40

Above

Piet Hein Eek: Waste Waste 40×40

Above

Piet Hein Eek: Waste Waste 40×40

Share Article

Further Info

About the Author

James Cartwright

James started out as an intern in 2011 and came back in summer of 2012 to work online and latterly as Print Editor, before leaving in May 2015.

It's Nice That Newsletters

Fancy a bit of It's Nice That in your inbox? Sign up to our newsletters and we'll keep you in the loop with everything good going on in the creative world.