Tinted Love

‘Blushing Bar’, by Chan + Eayrs, Sebastian Cox and American Hardwood Export Council

- Ellie Stathaki

It is lunchtime at Sebastian Cox’s workshop in Greenwich, south-east London, and Cox, his studio co-director and wife Brogan, along with architects (and work and life partners) Zoe Chan and Merlin Eayrs are sat around a communal table. A spread of falafels and sweet potato fries has been laid out, but even so, the gentle smell of freshly cut wood seems omnipresent. It neatly highlights Cox’s passion for British woodlands and his expertise in working with timber. Almost everything around us is made out of wood – a mix of display items, working models and the workspace’s furniture.

Chan and Eayrs, Cox and the American Hardwood Export Council (AHEC) collaborated on the largest piece in this year’s Wallpaper* Handmade show in Milan, the ‘Blushing Bar’. And while timber is the main protagonist in this project, too, there’s plenty in its design to make the structure really stand out within the workshop – from the unusual and perfectly executed design, to the species itself (American red oak, which is largely unknown in Europe), and the methods applied (as hinted by the strange pinky red ink stains on the floor and walls around us).

‘We wanted to challenge the idea of the linear bar that acts as a boundary between the bartender and the public, and also its materiality,’ says Chan. ‘So we started with an open mind and wanted to see what the conversations with Seb led to. Our approach was informed by our first meeting with him and David [Venables, AHEC’s European director], who told us about the properties of red oak. We always like to integrate making techniques into our design process.’