In the Boudoir with Bethan Laura Wood
Meisen Cabinet Little bug by Bethan Laura Wood for Nilufar (image: Emanuele Tortora).
If ornament is a crime, then designer Bethan Laura Wood wants to break the law. Ornate, her upcoming solo show at Milan’s Nilufar, is a celebration of elaborate decoration and interconnected details.
To mark a decade of collaboration between Wood and Nilufar’s founder Nina Yashar, the pair have created a show that will place new pieces from the designer alongside treasures from the gallerist’s archive. Many of the objects are from Wood’s own career, creating threads of connection that stretch back through their collaboration. Others have been chosen to namecheck the designers of the 20th century that Wood draws inspiration from.
Bethan Laura Wood’s new show at Nilufar is called Ornate (image: Mark Cocksedge)
Layering up meaning like this is part of Wood’s deliberate drive towards maximalism and away from the kind of stark minimalism fetishised by certain corners of the design world. “I like the idea of using the ornamentation as the starting point rather than it being the end point,” Wood says. “It's a common ethos in design that you strip back to get to a ‘pure’ version of a piece,” she adds. “I wanted to subvert that.”
Wood also wants to use Ornate to subvert ideas about femininity and ornamentation. Her new pieces all inhabit an imagined boudoir, the Victorian idea of a private chamber where an upper-class woman could retire to fix her hair and – per the French verb “bouder” – have a sulk. By giving fripperies and frivolity the attention they deserve, the designer is building a boudoir to rival its masculine counterpart – the cabinet – with help from Yashar’s wunderkammer of a gallery.
“It’s a common ethos in design that you strip back to get to a ‘pure’ version of a piece. I wanted to subvert that.”
“Boudoir” is a loaded word. Even the connotations of a room for sulking frames emotions as feminine and excess. Like glamour and froufrou, it’s still steeped in connotations of ornamentation and femininity as silly and vain. By using it as an imaginative space for her work, Wood goes against the grain at a time when much contemporary design leans towards an ascetic, masculine minimalism that conforms to the tastes of Silicon Valley’s band of tech bros.
Wood used ALPI veneer offcuts that reminded her of meisen kimono (image: Emanuele Tortora).
We are increasingly asked to find beauty in something that has been pared down to its most “optimised” form – which usually means rounded edges and bland neutrals. Think the Apple effect, sans serif fonts and homogenised Japandi interiors. In contrast, Wood’s work is an explosion of colour and cross-referenced details that she has gleaned, magpie-like, from different cultures and time periods. Rather than squeeze out individuality in a drive towards optimisation, she makes the case for fun. Who wants to live in a room or a world expunged of emotion and decoration, anyway?
“I like the idea of reclaiming the word ‘boudoir’,” explains Wood. For women throughout history, she explains, accessorising was one of the limited outlets for semaphoring individuality and autonomy. Ornate elevates domestic pieces, covering mirrors in intricate glass decorations that turn them into giant fruit slices and turning desks and bureaus into exquisite decorative yet entirely functional pieces.
Meisen Cabinet Tall Bug by Bethan Laura Wood for her new show Ornate (image: Emanuele Tortora).
The Meisen Cabinets – named for their serendipitous similarity to patterned Japanese kimonos from the 20s and 30s – started off with a focus on the handle. Handles, says Wood, are the jewellery of furniture. Here, metal tubes are curved into U-bends as a nod to the handrails of the city’s public transport system. “If you look at the underground in Milan you’ll see the same curve motif as the handle,” Wood explains. The shape also appears in the frame of Tre Pezzi, the armchair created in 1959 by Franco Albini and Franca Helg, the designers of Milan’s metro system. A Tre Pezzi from the gallery’s collection will be included in the show.
For the form of the Meisen pieces, Wood switched from the underground to exoskeletons, looking at insect wing cases as a reference for the scalloped hinges and scooped desk handles. The trays on the top reference lacquered cabinets from East Asia, while the veneer recalls Japanese fabrics and Indonesian Ikat prints. This is a happy accident.
Curved handles reference Milan underground handrails and the Tre Pezzi chair (image: Emanuele Tortora).
Wood sourced the veneer from Italian company ALPI during a visit between lockdowns, selecting offcuts from blocks that are being re-processed to create a repeating pattern. “I fell in love with these mid-process veneers that aren’t usually commercially available,” she says. “Every couple of sheets the whole colour changes. It’s a mix between the uncontrollable nature of the sheet and this intense industrial production.”
This use of veneer offcuts connects Meisen with Particle, a modular furniture system Wood designed as part of her 2010 residency at London’s Design Museum, which will also be on display at Nilafur. Part of Wood’s Super Fake oeuvre, the interlocking pieces of Particle are made of leftover scraps of faux wood laminate designed to look like OSB Board jigsawed together as in classic marquetry. “I’ve always been fascinated by these abstract patterns, these explosions of wood grain you get when you observe OSB Board closely,” explains Wood.
Wood found the patterns in the veneer offcuts resembled Ikat prints (image: Emanuele Tortora).
Wood’s work runs the gamut from transforming the odds and ends of industrial materials, to working with high-end artisans in rarified disciplines. Totem, a stack of glass lamps that was the first piece commissioned from Wood by the gallery back in 2011, will be shown alongside her new collection BonBon – wall lamps shaped like large colourful flowers. Both were made from hand-blown Pyrex glass by Pietro Viero, an artisan glassmaker based on Murano. “It’s really nice to see how we've developed a language and a form together over time,” she says.
BonBon bloomed over lockdown, while Wood was stuck in her studio and seeking succour from nature. “Because of covid I've had to do a lot more remotely,” she says. “Some things we built in house, in my studio in London, some things we built in Italy, so I've only seen the final versions,” she explains. “I just went to the show’s installation and it was very exciting, and also quite nerve wracking.”
BonBob Wall Lamp is made of hand-blown Pyrex glass (image: Emanuele Tortora).
Being confined indoors for much of Ornate’s evolution led Wood to meditate on Virginia Woolf’s seminal essay A Room of One’s Own, in which the radical writer makes the case for the importance of personal space – and an independent income – for women to be able to create.
“The importance of having a space to work and create became very apparent for people during lockdown,” Wood says. “It’s about the luxury of space.” This loops back to Wood’s reinvention of the boudoir as a place of “spiritual contemplation and physical cultivation” where decoration is a key part of (self)invention. Pieces made in isolation are displayed in conversation with historic pieces, layering up meaning like the strands of a necklace.
Words: India Block
Ornate by Bethan Laura Wood is on at Nilufar from 5 September – 27 November 2021.