Decorex 2015 News: Lara Bohinc launches her first furniture collection

For morst of interior designers and designers, annual trade shows are their biggest opportunity to showcase its newest design novelties, either branch they work with! During the Salone del Mobile in Milan, designers and makers from all disciplines are matched with manufacturers and briefs to create a new piece that is out of their ordinary sphere of activity. The results, often impossible to predict, frequently go on to have a life of their own, and this September, in a particular London Design Event, one such collaboration moves into a new orbit as Lara Bohinc launches her first furniture collection Lunar Collection with luxury stone specialists Lapicida. This exhibition will be thrill to watch…and will keep your Decorex 2015 News updated!

There’s always one or two projects in the Handmade exhibition that have particularly stand-out appeal, and in 2014’s exhibition it was Bohinc’s four-tier circular Solaris Kinetic table that received its share of attention. In brass and marble with an internal mechanism that enabled each tier of the table to move seamlessly, it was not only all over the design press but an instant commercial hit too.

For Bohinc, the task of translating her skills and inspirations&ideas as a jewellery designer into the world of luxury furniture was not that unfamiliar. “I originally studied industrial design before metalwork and jewellery,” she explains. “It was more a question of expanding my designs onto larger scale but the inspirations, materials (stone and metal) and techniques (3D milling, laser cutting, welding and setting) were more or less the same. I consider jewellery as an object for the body and furniture an object for the home. I like to make precious objects, whatever the scale.”

The new collection, like the original Solaris table, takes inspiration from the planets and their movements, and features a series of marbles set within brass or 18ct gold-plated steel rims. There are three new models: the Half Moon dining table, the Full Moon side table and the Sun and Moon coffee table. Discs echoing planetary forms are overlaid or partially eclipsed, making a series of dynamic surface patterns and structural elements.

For stone specialists Lapicida, the project is an opportunity to showcase not only their materials, but the impressive craftsmanship involved in shaping them. Building on the current trend for using colourful natural marbles, the Lunar Collection incorporates some stunning stones: Persian Gold, Verde Guatemala, Red Wine and Black and Gold are all featured. And that makes all the more sense considering one of Bohinc’s central inspirations were the historic buildings of Venice, where complex marble inlay has been a decorative art for centuries.

Bohinc’s contemporary design vocabulary might seem a million light years from the relics of ancient times, but it brings a fresh new language to the old stone marquetry techniques such as Pietra Dura and Opus Sectile that Lapicida used in the making of the pieces. The Half Moon dining table requires over 100 hours’ work by the craftsmen in Lapicida’s Harrogate workshops and the smaller tables are only marginally less demanding.

The Lunar Collection will debut at Decorex 2015 London, and Lara Bohinc will also be opening a new store next month in Notting Hill to house the full collection of jewellery, home accessories (such as the candle holders and desk accessories she is developing with Skultana) and the new furniture.