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We Dig This Silvered Doug: One & Co's Periodic Tables

By Rain Noe - October 10, 2011

in Materials

I often place what I consider to be good design into one of two categories: 1) So brilliant and complex that I wonder how they ever conceived of it, and 2) So simple that I wonder why no one had thought of it before. These two tables designed by One & Co. fall into the latter category.

Produced by Council, a furniture company whose somewhat paradoxical solution for promoting modern American design is to assemble "a melting pot of pieces by designers from around the world," the Periodic table (above) and the 47 table (below) both consist of wood coated in silver.The knots, cracks and grain in these chunks of Douglas Fir contrasted with the sleek shine of the silver is a perfect harnessing of two distinct materials. I also dig that the Doug is reclaimed and decades-old.

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Luke

13 years ago

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@Nick Brawne

Affordability is a whole separate issue from design. The total cost of materials that go into these particular pieces are undoubtedly orders of magnitude less than the price of the finished goods.

These, more than anything, are decorative pieces, and I suspect that beyond just trying to maximize profit to a ludicrous degree, the high price is there to prevent this idea from catching on and becoming a fad too quickly. Rich people want something to separate themselves from the poorer masses, like it or not.

Is this decadent to the point you could say buying it would be in bad taste? Probably. But that doesn't stop people from dropping millions on classic paintings, does it? If you really want a kitschy silvered block of wood with a pretentious description about putting emphasis on both surface and substance, just go make your own.

As for the silver plating process, it ought to yield a fairly non-toxic product. Silver and its salts are notoriously hard to dissolve, save for silver nitrate, so it lends itself well to getting deposited. The old-fashioned way of silvering glass is applying an aqueous mix of silver nitrate, dextrose, and ammonia, for example. Might be worth experimenting with that process on wood. This could've possibly also been gilded with silver leaf; it's soft enough for that.
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Julie

13 years ago

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So should artists, designers and craftspeople just stop designing objects of beauty because they are expensive and rarifed?
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Nick Brawne

13 years ago

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One & Co's silvered douglas fir tables are undeniably beautiful objects, and as stated a visually simple solution, although complex in manufacture - the many chemicals the wood must be soaked in before being plated with silver.

Is the reclaimed douglas fire now re-usable, or a toxic nightmare?

Even less elegant is the stratified world that these pieces exist in. The large, Periodic Table retails for $42,000. It may be gauche to discuss money when evaluating design, but the cost of a product has a huge impact on how a product is used, and who will use it. Good design should be affordable, or at least accessible. The only people who can comfortably afford a table such as this are those who earn more in a year than I and 99.9% of the population will ever earn in a lifetime. $42,000 for a table at a time when 16% of the US population is living below the poverty line and more than 10% are unemployed. Thats over 30,000,000 people without a job, and 48,000,000 living in poverty in a country of 300 million.

For the (still relatively affluent) unwashed masses there is always the $800 copy.

http://www.zgallerie.com/p-10418-timber-coffee-table.aspx
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