Interviewe mat Antfier

Camarade began with a deliberate refusal: an adjustable stool should not look adjustable. Most height-adjustable seating advertises its hardware — exposed cylinders, chrome levers, a "task" aesthetic that belongs in an office rather than a home or a restaurant. Big-Game's intent was the opposite: conceal the engineering so completely that the stool reads as fixed, archetypal furniture. The decisive step was resolving the integrated gas-lift and central telescopic column into a single quiet vertical line, stabilised by a weighted steel base, with a solid-beech footrest that travels with the seat from 59 to 79 cm. Once the mechanism had disappeared and the silhouette still felt calm and inevitable at every height — equally resolved under a 90 cm worktop or at a 110 cm bar — the balance between structural integrity and visual minimalism had held. That clarity set the whole family: the same language carried into the fixed 65 cm stool, the 45 cm low stool and the height-adjustable table.

Camarade was conceived for a condition we kept encountering on both sides of the French–Swiss border: the kitchen island that becomes a desk, the café that doubles as a co-working space, the hotel lobby that behaves like a living room. Rather than design two products — one "domestic," one "contract" — we made a single object honest enough for both. The contract-grade decisions are invisible: a weighted steel base from Manufacture Navailles and a European beech seat from Bastiat, dimensioned for the intensive use of a café or restaurant. The domestic register comes from the same parts — the warmth of solid beech, the restraint of the Terre de Sienne and Ardoise finishes, a footrest that reads as a detail rather than a fitting. What stood out most was how little the object needed to change to cross between a private apartment and a high-traffic venue: when materials are genuine, they age convincingly in both.

Working with European beech and French steel suppliers was a decision about traceability as much as aesthetics. The seat is made by Bastiat, a workshop holding the Entreprise du Patrimoine Vivant label — a French state distinction for craft and industrial excellence — and the steel base is produced by Manufacture Navailles in the Landes. Keeping production in France shortens the supply chain, sustains specific regional know-how, and lets us stand behind every stage of the object. But traceability is only half the environmental argument; the other half is longevity. The most responsible piece of furniture is the one that doesn't need replacing. Camarade is built to be repaired, re-ordered and extended rather than discarded, and its solid materials improve with use rather than degrade. In the broader conversation about sourcing, we think durability and local accountability matter more than any single recycled-content claim.

Of the four — innovative material use, ergonomic comfort, adaptive design and cultural relevance — adaptive design is the one Camarade embodies most completely, and the other three exist in its service. The collection's premise is a single, quiet object that adapts to the person and the place: a seat that moves from 59 to 79 cm, a language that stretches from a low stool to a high stool to a height-adjustable table. Material use, with European beech and French steel, gives that adaptability the durability to survive real use; ergonomic comfort makes the adjustment meaningful rather than a gimmick; cultural relevance is what lets the same piece feel right in a Paris apartment and a hotel bar. Adaptive design carries the greatest significance for us because it answers how people actually live now — across blurred domestic and professional settings — rather than dictating a single fixed posture or context. The recognition rewards a quiet idea: furniture that adjusts to life instead of asking life to adjust to it.

The central challenge was exactly the one the question names: making a slender steel structure carry the loads and leverage of a height-adjustable, weight-bearing stool without thickening into something industrial. The lesson that stayed with us is that warmth in furniture is an engineering outcome as much as a stylistic one. A profile reads as calm only when it is correctly sized, properly weighted at the base, and honestly joined — over-build it and it looks heavy, under-build it and it feels nervous. Working closely with our French steel manufacturer, Navailles, we tuned the base mass and the column so the stool feels effortless at every height while remaining genuinely robust for contract use. That principle — that restraint must be earned through structure rather than faked through styling — now informs everything we do. The discipline is to remove material until only the necessary remains, and not one element further, so that strength and quietness become the same decision.

We don't experience it as a tension so much as a continuity. The modernist utility tradition — constructive honesty, nothing decorative, every element earning its place — is the discipline we work within, not a style we quote. Camarade is deliberately archetypal: you recognise it before you analyse it. The genuinely new territory is behavioural rather than formal. What is contemporary is not a novel shape but how the object behaves — adjustment hidden inside a familiar silhouette, one family serving home, café, hotel and workspace as those boundaries dissolve. So we honour the tradition by keeping the language quiet and the construction honest, and we push it forward by letting the object do something the modernists' fixed furniture never had to: adapt, continuously and invisibly, to people who move between domestic and professional life many times a day. The homage and the innovation live in the same gesture — a calm form that quietly does more than it shows.

We treated the two materials as a deliberate dialogue rather than a contrast to be won. Beech is where the body meets the object — seat and footrest — so it always occupies the warm, tactile, human positions; steel does the structural work — column and weighted base — and stays disciplined and recessive. Calibrating them across the low stool, high stool, adjustable stool and table was a matter of proportion: the wood is given generous, sculpted volume where you touch it, while the steel is kept slender and quiet, finished in muted tones — Terre de Sienne brûlée or Ardoise — so it reads as a considered colour rather than raw metal. Neither overwhelms the other because each is assigned its honest role. That material dialogue is, ultimately, the identity of Camarade: industrial rigour and domestic warmth are not opposites to reconcile but two halves of one idea — furniture built to last that you still genuinely want to live with.

Most adjustable furniture treats its mechanism as the headline — visible levers and cylinders that announce "look what this does." We think that is backwards. Adjustability should be felt, not displayed. Concealing the mechanism inside a calm, archetypal form is a kind of respect: it puts the user's experience and their interior ahead of the manufacturer's urge to advertise features. The stool simply rises to the right height; the person is never reminded they are operating a device. We believe that is where functional design is heading — away from the visible "technical" aesthetic and toward objects whose intelligence is invisible, where the highest compliment is that nobody notices the engineering at all. It challenges the convention that adjustability must look adjustable to justify its price. Camarade makes the opposite case: the more seamlessly a function disappears into a beautiful object, the more valuable, and the more humane, that object becomes.

Camarade established a principle we expect to keep exploring: that a single, honest object can move fluidly between residential and professional life rather than forcing a choice between the two. As hybrid living and working become the norm, the interesting work lies in furniture that is quietly adaptable, durable enough for intensive use, and warm enough to belong at home — without splitting into separate "contract" and "domestic" lines. Formally, the vocabulary Camarade established — a calm silhouette, concealed function, the dialogue of beech and steel — gives us a foundation to extend into other typologies that these hybrid spaces need. The direction is less about inventing new shapes and more about deepening this idea: objects that adapt to people and places without announcing it, made to last across changes of use, and designed for environments whose function is no longer fixed. We see the next generation of spaces rewarding restraint, repairability and genuine versatility.

The collection is held together by a small, consistent set of elements rather than a single repeated shape. Across the low stool, high stool, adjustable stool and table, the shared vocabulary is the same: a slender steel structure rising from a weighted, circular base, the sculpted beech where the body makes contact, the same restrained finishes, the same honest joinery. That common grammar is what makes any piece read instantly as Camarade. Distinct functional identity comes from how each piece resolves its own job within that grammar — through proportion and height. The low stool works as an occasional seat or side table, the high stool sits fixed at a counter, the adjustable stool spans worktop to bar, and the table holds a working surface from 75 to 102 cm. The logic, in short, is unity in the parts and difference in the proportions: every piece speaks the same language, but each one says something distinctly its own.