Zene Dining chair by John G Williams is a highly esteemed winner of the very prestigious 2018 A' Design Award in Furniture Design Competition Category.
IronFurniture· 2018
Zene Dining chair
Client: John G Williams
A' Design Award Winner in Furniture Category
Verified Award Winner
Verify Award Status for #58495The Design
About Zene Dining chair
Zene dining chair takes its inspiration from indigenous timber and Danish Modern design. The light ash frames are simple and robust and support hardwood seats and backrests that appear to float on the frame. The curved forms of the seat/backrest are not formed by bending the wood but rather by joining and shaping solid hardwood timber. As a series the light ash frames provide cohesion, and different local materials selected for the seat/backrests generate interest and relevance.
The Recognition
About the A' Design Award
Zene Dining chair is an Iron A' Design Award winner, a prestigious recognition granted to good designs that meet the professional and industrial requirements expected from well-designed creations. Iron winners demonstrate great skill, high specialization, expert understanding, and creative capacity of their creators. Zene Dining chair is expected to be a highly regarded, admired, and cherished creation that is practical and innovative. This Iron A' Design Award-winning design integrates industry best practices and has competent technical characteristics linked with know-how and talent. Zene Dining chair is respected for its thoroughness and is designed to provide quality of life improvements that help make the world a better place.
Interviews
Design Interview
What is the main principle, idea and inspiration behind your design?
The main idea behind the Zene dining chair is to provide a seating experience that is extremely comfortable over extended periods through careful attention to the key ergonomic aspects of the design. The chair takes its inspiration from richly grained indigenous hardwoods. A variety of wood types are selected for the seat/backrest combinations, and the repeating theme of the white ash frames provides cohesion to the series.
What has been your main focus in designing this work? Especially what did you want to achieve?
I was interested in building something that was intriguing and beautiful. Something that seemed really simple and elegant, and yet which was far hard to detail, build and finish than might immediately appear. I wanted to achieve a strong and practical piece that through careful design would appear much lighter
What are your future plans for this award winning design?
I conceived and built this design on a speculative basis. My dream would be for a major design company or production house to fall in love with it and seek to make it available in limited quantities.
Behind the Design
Press Kit
Credits, team members and technical details provided by the designer.
- Unique Properties
- This series of dining chairs have American ash frames and showcase different hardwood timbers for the seat/backrest combinations.
The chairs draw on the ancient art of 'coopering' or how oak barrels are made for fermentation purposes. The curved forms of the seat/backrest are not formed by bending but rather by joining and shaping solid hardwood timber.
The chair strives to be very strong and beautiful. In short: Zene -
elegant, comfortable and dependable. - Dimensions & Packaging
- 515mm wide x 570mm deep x 890mm high
seat: 515mm wide x 390mm deep
back:515mm wide x 200mm high - Tags
- zene, dining chair, south africa, hardwood, curved, cooper, danish modern, minimalist
- Production Technology
- The Zene design evolved over a number of years. The starting point was probably a fascination with the art of coopering and how this has been applied to furniture design. Building the segmented seat and backrests took some practice to perfect, as did the development of custom modifications to standard workshop tools to shape and finish the smoothly shaped forms.
- Design Challenge
- Building the coopered seat/backrests was challenging as it required careful attention to the compression forces on the material and how best to achieve high compression without causing the seats to 'implode'.
Shaping the rough seats into finely finished and smooth curves required considerable re-working of the custom tooling to achieve the desired results - Research
- Danish modern designs were studied and absorbed to consider different ways of rendering the frame, and its relationship to the seat, and to think through the spatial relationship of the seat to the backrest.
Web search was used to think about typical dimensions for the seat but in the end prototyping proved most fun. - Inspiration
- The beauty grain and colour of indigenous African timber was a key aesthetic inspiration for this project. The more technical inspiration for the overall work, including the frame design came from iconic designers such as Hans J Wegner (for example the CH20 Elbow Chair). The coopering technique was inspired by Ontario furniture designer Adrian Ferrazzutti.
- Project Duration
- The first prototype was conceived in Johannesburg in 2007. It was slowly refined as background task over 10 years, and the first set of 6 chairs was produced in 2017
- Operation Flow
- Zene is designed mainly for use at the dining table and is designed for extended dining comfort.
- Patents
- no patents pending
- Team Members
- John G Williams: designer, craftsman
- Image Credits
- all images by the designer: John G Williams
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