“Amazon boxes, those are really the worst,” declares Max Lamb. The British furniture designer is on speakerphone, decrying the demerits of cardboard varietals, the contents of his car jangling as he traverses the rutted roads near his home and studio in Harrow on the Hill, outside of London.
The designer is in the final stages of preparing “Box 2,” his latest furniture collection made entirely of the ubiquitous and overlooked material. The show, an extension of his recent exhibition at London’s Gallery Fumi last October, also marks the designer’s West Coast debut.
From Feb. 19, the stools, chairs, and coffee tables he’s been working on—some of which bear cryptic markings from their past lives—will be on view at Sized Studio in Los Angeles. Lamb’s design philosophy stems from his reverence for constraints. For his 2017 collection “Boulders,” he wore soft depressions into rough blocks of granite, mimicking the eons-long erosive effect of water on stone.
“Box 2” may be focused on a more contemporary phenomenon, our castaway culture, but the subtlety of Lamb's interventions and the purity of their results are similar. “The main principle here is to get rid of waste,” he says of his latest pieces, which, he emphasizes, are completely functional.
“All of the material from a single box remains part of the piece.” Using nothing but scraps of cardboard (detritus from his own home as well as his neighbors’), the occasional screw, and a simple flour-and-water paste that he proudly claims “you could lick off your hands,” Lamb creates quiet testaments to trash—something from nothing.
Will these objects, tattooed with barcodes and mailman chicken scratch, stand the test of time? It may be too early to tell. “The idea is that they grow old gracefully. They mature, they wrinkle, maybe they get a bit grumpy, but they're still functional,” says the designer, laughing. “I’m describing myself here.”
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