DESIGN Furniture designer Nick Randall
Nick Randall loves the “tactile, curvaceous forms” of boats, so much so that the Hobart furniture designer built himself a fully functioning dinghy to learn how to make similarly inspired woodwork designs for the home. “It was just to get a hands-on feeling of how it works,” Randall says.
Through sideboards and tables, Randall reinvents the curving shapes of his boat to create functional works of art. “I’ve been around boats my whole life,” he says. “The past few years, I’ve been researching boat-building, boat-design and boat-making techniques. I’ve been reinterpreting them into furniture to be able to make these complex boat forms. But it’s also enabled me to be able to create the types of forms and works that I like.”
His dinghy, completed in 2012 and shown at the Australian Wooden Boat Festival in Hobart the following year, has gone a long way towards helping his furniture design.
“It’s one thing to read a book about a particular technique but being practical you’ve really got to get in there to try it and see how the wood bends,” he says.
Randall started developing his skills when he studied woodwork at school, making stools, cabinets and coffee tables.
He went straight on to study furniture design at the University of Tasmania, finishing in 2004. It was during his honours year that Randall really started to hone his personal style, and in 2005 he launched his business Nick Randall Design.
“That sort of gave me the freedom to do my own thing,” he says.
Each of Randall’s pieces can take up to two months and “it’s a very slow, patient work”.
“The kind of work I’m doing is very sinuous – at the moment, I’ve been creating curvaceous forms in timber,” he says.
The process begins with an idea, which he sketches by hand onto paper. He refines the designs through computer with a 3D software called Rhinoceros, and has recently started using a 3D printer to produce a model to scale.
“In the past, I used to hand-make scale models,” he says. “This makes it faster. It’s not a pretty sort of design but it lets me understand how to make it and understand the process.”
Randall uses local timbers such as Tasmanian oak and the flexible and “under-utilised” silver wattle to craft his furniture. Using the boat-making techniques he taught himself in the past few years, Randall crafts a frame first and then bends and nails together a series of about 50 planks, each only 10mm wide, with tiny pins.
“That gives you a rough shape, then you hand-sand it all to give you the really nice tactile form. There’s not a lot of carving. If you make your curves too severe, they break.”
But he hasn’t had any disasters yet. “I think if you jumped straight in and tried to make something like this without ever using that technique, you’d probably end in tears,” he says.
The craftsman sells his contemporary works and commissions from his website, occasionally sending pieces to shops such as Henry Jones Design and galleries. His recent solo show Synthesis was held at Design Tasmania, Launceston.
To see Nick Randall’s work or contact him for commissions, visit www.nickrandalldesign.com