art direction
& product design

The brief

TON is a Czech bentwood furniture manufacturer with 170 years of history — the original Thonet factory. When I joined as Art Director in 2011, the collection had strong manufacturing heritage but lacked coherent design direction. The role combined two things: art directing the overall collection and collaborating with external designers, while personally designing products — tables that are still in production today, and chairs that pushed the material to its structural limits.

The IMM Cologne stand

The IMM Cologne 2011 stand was the most concentrated expression of the TON material language. Three components — two Y-connectors at different angles and a straight bentwood rod — generated an entire spatial experience through repetition. The stand was not designed as architecture with furniture placed inside it. The furniture and the architecture were the same thing.

Bentwood has a grain direction. It has a bending radius. It has a memory. The diagonal rods in the stand were at angles that structural intuition said should not work — and they held because we understood the material from the inside, not from a specification sheet.

Wave rocking chair

Wave uses some of the longest bentwood rods in TON production history. The form had to earn its place by solving something the existing rocking chairs had not solved: the transition between the rocker and the seat structure, which in most bentwood rockers is resolved with a visible joint that interrupts the form.

Wave resolved it by bending a single continuous rod through the full arc from one rocker tip, up through the seat support, and back down to the other tip. The joint disappeared because the rod became the structure. Won Furniture of the Year Czech Republic 2011, German Design Award 2013 nominee.

Mojo cantilever armchair

The branching detail at the junction between the armrest and the seat shell was the soul of Mojo — and its flaw. Where other cantilever chairs resolve this junction with a conventional joint, Mojo grew the armrest organically from the seat. A single continuous form that split like a branch.

The transverse join connecting left and right sides under the seat could not hold sufficient stiffness over time. The chair was discontinued after reclamations accumulated at the branching detail. Good Design Award 2012.

What it cost and what it taught

Six years as Art Director and product designer at a bentwood factory taught me that the designer's real job is system orchestration, not form-making. The form is the result of getting the system right — the material logic, the production sequence, the exhibition narrative, the collection coherence. Coordinating external designers while making products yourself sharpens the brief-writing instinct considerably.