Straight from the files of the weird and the wild comes designer Nacho Carbonell and his “Bush of Iron” chair. This piece, which, some might claim, only a mother could love, is a bit of a prickly pear amid the more familiar tableaux of gleaming chrome and shiny smooth steel. The piece is, in fact, a great blossoming ball of iron that hides a bit of a chewy center in the form of an absolutely protected space for contemplation and—should you desire—study.

Bush of Iron. Designed by Nacho Carbonell.

Collection Showcases Multiple Incarnations of the Same Chair and Desk

Bush of Iron is the culminating piece of Carbonell’s Diversity Collection, which he exhibited at 2010’s Salone and Art Basel. The 20 or so individual pieces that constitute Diversity revolve around a common theme and a common form—a chair/desk or carrel unit joined by a single projecting filament on one side, with the other side open to permit ingress. Though the form is the same from piece to piece, Carbonell finished each with a distinctly different flourish, from comb-able “hair filaments” to granular concrete to shards of glass from broken wine bottles. The result explores the formal foundations of the idea of an A&D “product,” as the “distinct finishes for each suggest a demographically diverse neighborhood,” in spite of the identical skeleton.

Only Bush of Iron, with its web of projecting wire spires and its rupture between seat and desk, comes off as truly liberated from this varied assemblage. The piece is on swiveling casters, so in spite of its great mass users can comfortably rotate in the chair or pull the desk forward and aft. Once one does so, the outside world certainly falls away, as this Bush of Iron swiftly repels all comers, thus defining the piece as “a private space, protected from any interruptions… the outside is another story: like a porcupine, its spines are not there to make you cuddle comfortably around it.”

Via ChairBlog.

About the Manufacturer: Valencia-born Nacho Carbonell has an unorthodox vision and a surpassing imagination. His furnishings have a distinctive and fantastical aesthetic that owes as much to Tim Burton as it does to J.R.R. Tolkien. His pieces often adopt strange guises, displaying odd metamorphoses that explore the intersection between product and personage: “I like to see objects as living organisms, imagining them coming alive and being able to surprise you with their behaviour.” Carbonell has exhibited his work at Milan Design Week, Design Miami, and the Groningen Museum in The Netherlands.