Feel-good furniture
Peter Wehrspann aims for fun pieces and sustainable design inspired by nature
Achair with a sense of humour? That pretty much describes the Post Chair by Ottawabased furniture designer Peter Wehrspann. One glance at its cheekily retro fabric — old Canada Post mail sacks — and you can’t help grinning.
Making you feel good, not just physically, but emotionally, is key to Wehrspann’s design philosophy.
“As people, as consumers, we have needs, like sitting down,” says the woodworker and metal artist who also works as a wood technologist and instructor at Carleton University. “If something helps us in our daily lives, then we have a better sense of well-being. It makes our lives richer.”
Case in point: Water Bodies, a swirling, two-part coffee table he made for his parents. He designed it from sketches of Northern Ontario lakes where his father goes canoeing. He’s absolutely right when he says “the table is calming. (Designs) have a psychological impact.”
Not that Wehrspann creates in such a consciously deliberate fashion.
The Post Chair ($599), for example, sprang from pure serendipity. Sitting in his Carleton office adjoining a wood workshop, he explains that he was returning from a camping trip when he spotted some Canada Post canvas mail bags circa 1920s at a garage sale. He snatched them up with no particular use in mind.
Eventually, they became the basis of a chair, one he’s since reproduced for clients using beloved old T-shirts instead of mail sacks, for example, for one hip, young couple (like all his designs, the chair is available as a custom product).
“I try to take risks with design. If I don’t feel completely comfortable with something then I’ll try it, and someone will react.”
And while the 34 year old can talk design theory with the best of them (he recently completed a master’s degree in industrial design at Carleton), he says he’s at his happiest when creating and building.
His office bears that out: a tin of latex paint squats on the floor next to a weathered filing cabinet while his tool box — the hulking, fire-engine red type that car mechanics use — contains everything from woodworking tools to heavy wrenches for metal construction.
Designers like Wehrspann, in fact, tend to have a touch of the Renaissance man about them. One minute they’re sketching a high-level concept; the next, they’re firing up the table saw. Mind you, Wehrspann, a frank and open-faced fellow who’s wearing jeans and sagging socks the day we meet, admits to minimal interest in such quotidian tasks as balancing his chequebook.
He is, however, intently interested in sustainable design. For him, that means sourcing local or recycled components. He originally hoped to make his comfy and durable-looking IS Lounger ($699), for example, from clients’ or neighbourhood trees that had been removed because of disease.
When cost made that prohibitive, he decided to give clients the choice of using materials either certified by the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) as sustainably grown and harvested, or reclaimed wood from a Toronto recycler (although now based here, Wehrspann is a native of Toronto and maintains his company Holtzundmetal there).
His respect for the natural world includes turning to it for design ideas. Usually referred to as bio-inspiration or biomimicry, that means applying nature’s solutions to contemporary needs. Velcro, for example, was invented by George de Mestral, a Swiss electrical engineer, after he noticed that burrs stick to almost anything with a loop (in his case, his dog’s fur) thanks to the hundreds of tiny hooks on the seeds.
Bioinspiration has been around for millenniums but, like other designers, Wehrspann is finding fresh applications. They can range from his playful birch, aluminum and glass table Il Ragno Italiano (translation: The Italian Spider) to his plans for furniture that, like a locust’s legs, can be easily folded and stored, just the thing for the hip, small-unit condo market.
It’s no surprise, then, to notice that his office shelves include, in addition to The Woodbook and A Short History of Nearly Everything, a tome titled Insects and Wildlife.
Indeed, local sourcing, custom design and bio-inspiration are behind the examples of his furniture featured in the recently published Bespoke: Furniture from 101 International Artists (Schiffer Publishing).
Has he considered producing his custom-made furniture on a larger, less expensive scale? Absolutely, he answers. Then he laughs at himself for trying to justify potentially profitable mass marketing (“So more people can enjoy it”) and says with a shrug, “Well, I would like to have a certain lifestyle, too.”