Clerkenwell Design Week 2014: Austrian designer Georg Oehler has used traditional Scottish tweed fabric and British ash wood in this furniture collection, manufactured using traditional carpentry techniques in the Alpine village where he grew up.
London-based Georg Oehler, formerly of Austrian studio Pudelskern, unveiled his first solo furniture collection at Clerkenwell Design Week this week.
The Aesh and Tweed collection features a coffee table, armchair and footstool, designed to marry together traditional Austrian furniture-making techniques with naturally sourced British materials.
"I moved to the UK two years ago, so it's a bit of a personal thing for me to bring a piece of my old life to my new home country," designer Georg Oehler told Dezeen. "Also I think there are so many wonderful regional treasures in Europe, it's great to mix them a little bit."
Manufactured in a remote village in the Austrian Alps where Oehler grew up, the furniture is inspired by the surrounding natural landscape of his childhood home.
"The small village I grew up in is surrounded by the high mountains of Tyrol," Oehler said. "In my childhood, I spent almost every day outside there in the forests or in mountain meadows and this created a lifelong bond to the strong landscape."
The collection is crafted using traditional Austrian carpentry techniques, which have been practiced for thousands of years, to create interlocking mortise and tenon joints.
"This complex method ensures there are no 90-degree angles in any of the pieces of the frame," Oehler explained.
The frames are made from ash wood sourced from forests around England, chosen for its durability and long standing history in furniture making.
Traditional tweed hand woven on the Isle of Bute, an island off the coast of Scotland, is used to upholster the furniture.
A grey tweed and darker purple fabric contrast with the lighter grain of the ash wood. A square tufting pattern with welted seams is stitched into the arms and sides of the armchair and footstool.
The same pattern is hand carved into the face of the coffee table, creating a raised motif along a hinged panel that can be flipped down to reveal a hidden storage compartment.
The Aesh and Tweed collection was on display at the Detail exhibition at The Order of St John as part of Clerkenwell Design Week, which concluded yesterday.
Photography is by Justin Barton.