Behind Studio SL: Celebrating the voices shaping Silverlining’s creative future
Every piece begins with an idea. Sometimes it is a feeling a client wants to capture. Sometimes it is a concept they have carried for years but never seen realised. Often it is a vision without form, waiting to be shaped. Within our design studio, these beginnings are what we live for. They are the quiet sparks that grow into something remarkable.
Studio SL is Silverlining’s in-house design team. Since its creation in 2005, it has been a place where ideas are tested, challenged and refined into physical form. It is where creative instinct meets technical understanding, and where drawings become details, and details become heirlooms.
Bringing together designers from a range of backgrounds and disciplines, the studio is united by a shared belief in quality, beauty and the importance of craft. There is no single style or formula. What defines our work is a collective ability to translate ideas into meaningful, enduring pieces. To listen with care, to imagine with clarity and to respond with confidence.
Design is never a solitary gesture,
It is a process built on dialogue
With our clients, with our makers and with the possibilities of technique and proportion. From the earliest sketch, our designers work hand in hand with the workshop, drawing on decades of shared experience across construction, material development and finishing. The outcome is never a compromise between design and making. It is a true collaboration where each discipline deepens the other.
You will often find a designer sketching alongside a maker, testing ideas with offcuts and templates, revisiting proportions in real time. The process is fluid, intuitive, and fuelled by mutual respect. Some of our best ideas are born in the in-between moments, over a conversation on the workshop floor or in the quiet attention to a detail that changes everything.
CASe study: Wave Cabinets
Some of our most ambitious commissions have begun with questions that demanded entirely new ways of thinking. These external challenges have led us to expand our processes, invent structures, rethink materials and discover original approaches to form. What may begin as a personal vision often becomes an opportunity for collective invention.
One such commission began with a simple yet poetic question: could we capture the rhythm of the sea in the form of a cabinet?
The client was deeply drawn to the ocean, not only for its vastness but for the way its movements seemed to hold time itself. In response, our team designed a mirrored pair of sculptural cabinets that echoed the rise and fall of waves.
The process began with hand drawings, guided more by intuition than geometry. These lines were gradually refined using advanced modelling, allowing the idea to take on dimension and depth. In the workshop, the form was brought to life with quiet precision.
The flowing façade was shaped using a five axis router, then veneered in quilted maple, hand dyed to a silvery taupe that shimmered like sunlit water. The subtle irregularities in the grain mirrored the sea’s shifting surface, while bespoke pivot hinges allowed the doors to open along soft, sculptural curves. The result was a piece that seemed to breathe, to move, even in stillness.
Many of the clients who come to us are not simply looking for something rare or beautiful. They are seeking a process as considered as the result. A way to shape their ideas through collaboration, curiosity and care.
Whether creating a one of a kind commission or exploring new creative directions, our design studio brings the same clarity of purpose to every project. We design to endure. We design to connect. We design with the belief that furniture is not simply functional, but emotional. It carries identity, memory and meaning.
Every journey begins with a moment of curiosity. Sometimes a question, sometimes an idea not yet formed. We exist to shape those beginnings into something lasting.
Subscribe to our newsletter
Sign-up to receive our newsletter and discover our stories, collections and latest innovations.
