Tag Archives: book design

Yinka Ilori Finally Told the Story of Chairs Nobody Wanted

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Every neighborhood has that curb. The one where a slightly wobbly dining chair or a stained armchair shows up on trash day, waiting for someone to either haul it to the dump or grab it before the truck does. Most of us walk past. We’ve been trained to see secondhand furniture as a problem to solve quickly, not a story worth keeping. That instinct, to discard first and ask questions never, is exactly what London-based designer Yinka Ilori has spent more than a decade pushing back against.

His new book, “Chairman,” published by ORO Editions, is the first to focus entirely on the furniture that made him famous: chairs he’s rescued from charity shops and street corners across London, then transformed with color, pattern, and a little bit of mischief. At 120 pages, it traces over ten years of work through what he calls vessels of memory, migration, and identity, three words that sound academic until you actually look at what he’s built. As Ilori puts it, chairs were his first design love because of the stories they carry, and that single line explains his career better than any curator’s essay could.

Designer: Yinka Ilori

I like that the book doesn’t pretend the chairs are just chairs. Ilori has said that vintage furniture holds “personal stories, secrets, emotions, and sentiments,” and in his British-Nigerian household, offering someone your chair was never a small gesture. It meant you were inviting them into your life, your gossip, your grief. That idea shows up again and again in his work, most memorably in his 2015 show “If Chairs Could Talk,” where he named restored pieces after childhood friends from his neighborhood, some who went on to do well, others who didn’t. The point wasn’t to rank them. It was to remind people that judging a chair, or a person, by its current condition tells you nothing about where it’s been.

That’s the part of Ilori’s practice I find genuinely refreshing in a design landscape that often treats furniture as either disposable or precious, with nothing in between. He’s neither flipping thrift store finds for profit nor placing them behind museum glass. He’s giving them jobs to do again, usually with a candle holder tucked into a backrest or a plant shelf built into an armrest, details that are playful without being gimmicky.

We have our own complicated relationship with secondhand furniture. We love a good flea market flip on television, but we also replace couches the way we replace phones, and curbside “free” piles rarely stay put for long before someone tosses them for good anyway. Ilori’s approach, sourcing directly from charity shops rather than manufacturing new pieces from scratch, quietly argues for a slower, more attached way of living with objects. He’s not lecturing anyone about sustainability. He’s just showing what happens when you actually look at a chair before deciding it’s garbage.

The book also situates his chair work inside a wider circle of artists and designers, which feels right, because Ilori has never worked in isolation the way some monograph subjects like to pretend they have. One section, drawn from his “There Is Good in All of Us” collection, makes that point almost too plainly, turning cast-off seating into small monuments to second chances. His path from upcycling furniture in 2011 to large public commissions, like the Colour Palace at Dulwich Picture Gallery or his Adidas collaboration, started with exactly this kind of hands-on, unglamorous restoration work. “Chairman” makes the case that the chairs weren’t a warm-up act before the bigger projects. They were always the main story.

What stays with me most is how simple the underlying belief actually is. Ilori isn’t claiming that every discarded object deserves a second act. He’s pointing out that most of them never get the chance to prove whether they do. Design so often chases what’s new, but “Chairman” quietly argues for paying attention to what’s already here, sitting in a corner somewhere, waiting for someone to notice it hasn’t finished its story yet.

The post Yinka Ilori Finally Told the Story of Chairs Nobody Wanted first appeared on Yanko Design.

The Book With 24 Holes and Almost No Words

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Pick up Sebastian Bergne’s latest publication and you’ll immediately notice what’s not there. No lengthy introduction. No glossy product photography. No dense paragraphs of design theory. Just a small, grey booklet with a punched slot on the cover and 24 pages of quiet, deliberate emptiness inside. It sounds like very little, and that’s exactly the point.

Everyday Holes is Bergne’s first self-published booklet, and it arrives with the kind of confidence that only comes from more than 30 years of experience. An award-winning product and furniture designer, Bergne is one of Britain’s most respected practitioners in the field, the kind of designer who has spent decades thinking carefully about how objects are made and why they look the way they do. A recurring subject in that body of work, it turns out, has been holes. Not as an afterthought, but as a deliberate design element: functional, beautiful, and sometimes quietly meaningful.

Designer: Sebastian Bergne

The book’s format is brilliantly simple. Each right-hand page shows a life-size illustration of a hole or a cluster of holes, with no label, no caption, no hint of any kind. Your job is to figure out where it comes from. The answer is printed on the reverse. That’s the whole game, and it works far better than it has any right to. The moment of recognition, when a familiar shape suddenly clicks into place, is genuinely satisfying. Two small rectangular slots become a plug socket. A dense cluster of dots resolves into a shower head or a speaker grille. Stripped of all their surrounding context, these shapes become strange and new again, like seeing a word repeated until it loses its meaning.

Bergne gives you 24 of these moments, and the small-format, minimal production keeps the focus entirely on the holes themselves. No distractions. No unnecessary colour or decoration. The cover’s punched hang-tag slot doubles as both a functional detail and a dry design joke, which tells you a lot about where Bergne’s head is at. He’s clearly enjoying himself here, and that enjoyment is contagious. It’s rare for a design object to be both rigorous and fun at the same time, and this one manages it easily.

But underneath the playfulness, the book is making a serious point. Bergne’s introductory text argues that holes are not simply features cut into objects. Over time, they become the objects. The eye of a needle is not just a slot for thread. It is what a needle fundamentally is. The two holes in a button are what make it a button at all. Remove the surrounding material and keep only the void, and recognition still holds. That is a remarkable observation, and it quietly reframes the way you look at almost everything once it lands.

It also opens up a more provocative idea: if the absence of material carries as much meaning as the material itself, then perhaps good design is as much about what you leave out as what you put in. For a field that often equates quality with more, this feels like a genuinely welcome counterpoint. It’s a subtle argument for doing less, tucked inside what looks like a charming little quiz book.

As a physical object, Everyday Holes is exactly what it should be. Honest production, restrained design, no excess. It works as a gift for anyone who thinks seriously about how things are made. It works as a coffee table piece that actually starts conversations rather than just sitting there looking expensive. And it works as a solo read, the kind you finish in minutes but find yourself turning over in your head for days afterward.

The best design books don’t just document good design. They change how you see the world outside their pages. Everyday Holes manages that in under 24 pages and almost no words at all. Once you start noticing holes, really noticing them, the grid of a colander, the spacing of a grille, the deliberate placement of a buttonhole, you can’t quite stop. A small book about nothing that somehow changes how you see everything.

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