Furniture Design: Lex Pott turns oxidised metals into beautiful objects of use

Dutch designer Lex Pott has a product design practice that’s intuitive in its logic, making use of natural processes, historic traditions and happenstance to inform the conceptual backbone of his physical projects. He’s fashioned jewellery from coins, intentionally tarnished mirrors for aesthetic purposes and even, most impressively, created furniture that’s reliant upon the oxidisation of its component materials.

True Colours Shelves are the product of a year of experimentation with metallic elements and their chromatic shifts during oxidisation. When reactive metals like copper and iron are found in nature, their oxidised compounds have vastly different colours to the metallic sheen with which we’d usually associate them. Copper appears green, iron has a rich, earthy brown and aluminium a powdery white. Lex utilises the oxidisation process to create products that have a natural balance in their colouring, using both pure and oxidised versions of a single metal in heir construction. The results are beautiful and add a playful, organic feel to what would otherwise be very simple furniture.