‘La Belle et la Bête’ lounge chair
‘La Belle et la Bête’ lounge chair, by Xavier Lust, Kent Brushes and Delhez
When we asked Xavier Lust to dream up a new take on the body brush for this year’s Wallpaper* Handmade, we expected something radical. But what the Belgian designer came back with surpassed all our expectations. Lust thought big.
‘At first I reflected on the functional, practical aspects,’ says Lust. ‘Then my train of thought released itself from these very pragmatic concepts and my hand loosened on the paper. I thought that a sculptural shape, like a rock, covered with brush hairs could be an interesting element: a mysterious object on which we can lean or sit down, and have a tactile experience.’
Brush design has changed very little in the past few thousand years. Lust’s creation took a closer look not only at aesthetics, but also at function, transforming the rather basic activity of dry body brushing into an overall physical experience in the form of an oversized, conceptual bristled daybed.
To collaborate with Lust on this piece, we approached Kent Brushes. Founded in Hertfordshire, England, in 1777, it is the world’s oldest brush manufacturer. Lust also enlisted Belgian metal manufacturer Delhez, which specialises in innovative production techniques for steel and aluminium. Delhez created the daybed’s linear base, which consisted of an aluminium sheet, bent into a sinuous form and perforated to accommodate bristles. This was then shipped to Kent Brushes to complete the work.
‘The plan was to completely cover the daybed in tufts of natural boar bristle, using the perforated holes as the location point for each individual bristle tuft,’ says Kent Brushes’ creative director Ben Cosby, whose family acquired the company in 1932. But realising Lust’s design was not without challenges. ‘The hole size and tuft dimensions were five times what we are used to working with on our hairbrushes, and we had to develop new tools to pick the bristle and form the tufts,’ continues Cosby. ‘The wire we use to stitch bristle tufts into brushes also needed to be supersized. This stiffer gauge wire caused havoc with our nimble-fingered craftspeople, who had to wear heavy leather gloves just to be able to form and fit a tuft without the wire cutting their hands.’
To speed things up towards the end of production, Cosby and his team also had
to revert to a technique called pan-setting, a method new to the Kent craftspeople, which consists of handmaking each tuft separately and then embedding them onto the frame.
‘The euphoric feeling of overcoming the seemingly impossible really bound our team together, and over the next few days all involved went above and beyond to complete the piece in time,’ he says. Double shifts and triple shifts were the order of the day, with the final push turning out to be a 26-hour non-stop ‘tuftathon’ to complete the piece and hand it over to the courier waiting to take it straight to Salone in Milan.
The finished daybed might be far from our initial, rather simplistic ‘sculptural brush’ idea, but it fits this year’s Handmade theme of wellness and wonder beautifully. Lounging on it evokes the experience of relaxing on grass, and the natural boar bristles offer a massage that enhances blood circulation and encourages full body relaxation, turning the piece into a natural cocoon. Says Lust, ‘Humour, culture and technology merge here with the notions of rest, meditation and recharging.’
It also brings to life each collaborator’s aesthetic and savoir-faire: Lust’s unmistakable design approach, Delhez’s metal expertise, and Kent’s craftsmanship. ‘I transposed the traditional wooden brush into my personal formal language,’ says Lust, who calls this daybed ‘La Belle et la Bête’.
‘This contrasting piece is composed of mineral and organic materials, and the combination of these materials inspired the poetic concept of this daybed and its name: beauty lives in perfect symbiosis with the tender wild beast that protects her.’ xavierlust.com; kentbrushes.com; delhez.be