Beyond Boundaries

Beyond Boundaries celebrates what a material becomes when decoration gives way to discovery. Across six new studies, our workshop has looked beneath the surface of familiar materials, using subtraction, carving and colour drawn out from within, to reveal textures, tones and depths that would otherwise remain hidden.

This collection is the product of continuous curiosity, an instinct that has shaped our workshop for decades. Each piece invites a closer look, rewarding those who take the time to notice how one material gives way to another, and how much beauty exists just beneath what the eye first sees.

Optical Shift

Optical Shift plays with light and perspective, its surface appearing to shift in colour as you move around it, reading blue from one angle and white from another.

Formed from repeated 45-degree profiles in white and blue Paper Factor, a solid surface material made by compressing and bonding layers of recycled paper fibre under heat and pressure, giving it a strength and rigidity we do not often associate with paper. Waste off-cuts of multicoloured stacked coach-hide leather, finished with balm, punctuate the grid, grounding the illusion in something tactile and human-made.

Descending Swirl

Descending Swirl explores movement through contrast, pairing two very different characters of English oak veneer within a single tessellating marquetry pattern. Crown cut brings dramatic flame figuring, while straight grain offers a clean, linear counterpoint, together heightening the sense of rhythm across the surface.

Carving through the marquetry reveals a hidden layer beneath, deepest along one edge and fading toward the centre. On one face, natural olive ash sits above a layer of brown oak; on the other, oak stained with traditional gall ink, the same iron and tannin-based pigment once used to write the Magna Carta in 1215, sits above a layer of blue marbled resin.

Tonal Diffusion

Tonal Diffusion captures the changing character of water, from the dark depths of a waterfall to the fleeting shimmer of light across its surface. Rather than dyeing the face of the veneer directly, pigment is introduced to the reverse of lacewood, where its natural capillaries draw colour through to the front, letting the tones emerge organically rather than evenly.

The sample is two sided, each face developed to stand as the front of a finished piece. One side, reverse dyed and oxidised, is hand-burnished to a full-gloss finish, its blue pigment migrating through white timber; the other, in natural lacewood, is finished in a

soft, satin, open-grain texture, its tones diffusing gently into brown. Polished nickel-plated end caps frame the piece, with a stacked leather detail.

Echo

Marquetry has traditionally been a piece's decorative face, its pattern always meant to be seen. Echo turns that tradition inward, concealing a surface of blue ripple sycamore entirely beneath English oak, and revealing it only through a series of overlapping circular forms carved into the surface.

Where the carving cuts deepest, more of the marquetry beneath comes through; where it's shallow, the oak still conceals most of it, so the depth of every mark determines exactly how much colour is uncovered. One face is presented in natural oak, the other stained with traditional gall ink.

Shimmer Reveal

Shimmer Reveal is a study in how light moves across a single material through the course of a day, as if capturing its character from dawn to dusk. Sweeping arcs, cut with micro-CNC precision, divide the surface of English oak into changing directions, catching and scattering light differently as the viewpoint shifts.

A graduated finish, in white Rubio oil and gall ink, fades from white into exposed oak on one face, and from deep blue into natural timber on the other, echoing the quiet shift from morning light into evening shadow.

Tidal Eclipse

Tidal Eclipse draws its inspiration from the natural landscape, where water and land meet in gradual transitions rather than defined edges. Layers of cedar veneer, arranged in alternating grain directions and graduating thicknesses, are sculpted using CNC carving to draw out contours hidden within the material, before being finished entirely by hand.

Each face becomes its own expression of the same terrain, one scorched and white-oiled to a natural, open-grain finish, paired with bead-blasted aluminium, the other in pale, hand-oiled timber, paired with vanilla nubuck leather, hand-embossed to echo the same contoured pattern.