STYLE MAKER
Beautifully simple and seamlessly functional, the furniture made by Soroush Pourhashemi of Lozi Designs is perfect for everyday living
Meet furniture creator Soroush of Lozi Designs
When Soroush Pourhashemi was a young boy, his family had a chalet in the Iranian mountains. When it was cold, they would sit round a korsi, a low coffee table covered by a thick blanket and with a heater underneath. ‘Everyone would drink coffee, warm their feet and talk – there was always a story to be told. I still dream of making something like it, but now I would want to design the table for urban living.’
Souroush, who studied industrial and engineering design at Brunel University London, has already realised his big dream: eight years ago, spurred on by interest in his woodwork and design skills from family and friends, he established his own furniture business. He called it
Lozi – ‘which means “rhombus” in English furnituremaking and “simple” in Zambian, so the perfect word!’ – and it’s based in London’s happening Hackney.
The collaborative creative buzz and hum of the Lozi team makes for a joyful working week, says Soroush, an admirer of Alvar Aalto, the minimal Finnish designer and architect who worked imaginatively and inventively with bent plywood. ‘He really pushed the material in the 1930s, and I have tried to pick up from where he left off, but using digital design. So mixing traditional skills with technology.’
Lozi furniture’s gorgeous form and line – ‘the combination of a right angle with a curve is our signature’ – springs out of the love Soroush has for aesthetic design and the challenges of space-conscious urban living. The chair we sit on every day or the tiny kitchen we cook in every night needs, he says, to be both beautiful and practical, but it should also make us happy.
‘You might have a small living area that you want to be fully functional, but by making it personal, it will live longer,’ says Soroush, who invites customers to visit his space to see how the furniture is made and have a say in the design and individual detail. Near Columbia Road Flower Market in London, it functions as both a workshop and shop.
Take a look at the pieces Lozi makes (you can buy online or choose bespoke) and one concept stands out: well-crafted furniture needn’t cost the earth. Digital production methods enable precise planning, so each piece of soundly sourced wood goes a long way, and waste is shaved to a bare minimum, or put to good use.
‘Our £9.99 range is a collection of small pieces, such as coasters, candleholders and plant pots, repurposed from small offcuts from our production,’ says Soroush. ‘We see the bigger consequences in the world, we see climate change, so we’re careful. Any material we use, we treat as gold; we’re not letting it go before it becomes something useful or part of the furniture. And we know what we make might get handed down a generation.’
Whether you fall in love with the Wave table or the ingenious U-Shelf, you know it has craft at its heart. ‘There’s something deep inside every human being that likes making things and likes things that are made by hand,’ says Soroush. ‘That doesn’t change.’
Find out more at lozidesigns.com
‘There is something deep inside every human being that likes making things’