Since its inception in 2002, the Gabbertas Studio has established itself as one of Britain’s leading furniture design operations. Today, founder Mark Gabbertas is contemplating a new chapter in his crusade to create character through simplicity – Paul Farley joined him outside his studio in south-west London to find out more …
Change is in the air. The day is bright but crisp, summer giving way to autumn, as I corner the last two seats outside a small coffee shop at the entrance to Fulham’s Coda Studios complex.
I’m here to interview renowned British furniture designer, Mark Gabbertas. The multiple award-winner founded his own studio in 2002, and has gone on to work for various international brands including Allermuir, Boss, Gloster and Oasiq. His stated intent is “to create character through simplicity”, and I hope to soon grasp exactly what that means.
I reflect that it’s a good thing I can write in shorthand, as a dictaphone wouldn’t stand up to this level of background noise. As nice as this area is, the capital is as busy as ever, a power saw purring inside a scaffold-fronted building across the road, delivery vans going about their business, planes intermittently passing overhead.
Hot drinks in hand, Mark joins me. He’s polite and composed despite the distractions – but the bustle takes on a certain pathos when Mark opens the conversation by announcing his plan to leave “the maelstrom that is London”.
After spending 25 years here, it’s a significant change of direction. In February, together with the bulk of his design team, Mark will return to his Gloucestershire roots and set up shop in a purpose-built contemporary-industrial studio in Kingham, deep in the Cotswolds.
With rates rising, Brexit imminent, and a runway expansion for Heathrow freshly confirmed, the time to seek the greenery and solitude of pastures new has never seemed riper.
“There comes a point where we have to stop working for Government and start working for ourselves,” says Mark, as the costs of operating from London continue to soar. “We don’t need to be in London. It’s not like we’re just starting out in the industry – our clients are scattered all over the world.”
While the move represents a downsizing of sorts, the new showroom – which has been five years in the making, and remains, to Mark’s consternation, “not quite finished” – promises fresh focus. “There must be 15-20 projects going through the studio at any one time right now,” he says. “The move will let me be a little more selective about the work we do.”
A man renowned for his experimental approach to new materials and technologies, Mark boasts a portfolio that is punctuated by stand-out creations for both the domestic and contract markets.
“The distinction between these sectors is slightly false,” states Mark. “It’s an aesthetic industry construction rather than a consumer one – there’s an elasticity to the division. Today, plenty of consumers want their homes to look like hotels or restaurants, and vice versa. Office managers are asking themselves how they can make a workspace not look like a workspace. A lot of the designs that we create are equally at home in either environment.
“The way designers think has changed. Advances in manufacturing technologies and a greater understanding of how people use space means you don’t have to have such a rigid, functional divide between the two historically-opposing typologies.”
Mark describes how this grey area is further reinforced by the manner in which products are sold, citing the success of Vitra’s products through John Lewis.
If not market, it is form, then, that unifies Mark’s portfolio. Born in Yorkshire in 1962, Mark studied political philosophy before working in advertising. He began training as a cabinetmaker in 1990, before taking the designer-maker path. Chairs dominated his early work – a notable example being the 3° chair, designed for the Atelier restaurant in Soho (subsequently licensed to Allermuir) – and would come to define Mark’s field. “It’s just the way it happens,” he says.
By definition, chairs are simple objects, but understanding why one ‘works’ while another does not is far from straightforward. Comfort, material, colour and shape all exert an influence, but, for Mark, most crucial is understanding the context of how a chair is used, and the emotions it engenders.
He illustrates this philosophy with a quote from Virginia Woolf on critical theory: “The ‘book itself’ is not form which you see, but emotion which you feel.”
“We don’t start with rules,” he explains, lighting up a cigarette. “In general terms, as a designer, you don’t have much choice about what you do – initially, you design from the heart, and then your head starts to refine what your heart tells you. With experience, your approach becomes clearer.”
Haven, Allermuir (2011), a modular seating system that encourages flexible working practices
A decade ago, Mark created the Haven upholstery system for Allermuir, a modular family which aims to deliver a working space that can be both collaborative and private, a series of pods and seats that can be arranged for communication or contemplation.
“Haven illustrates the connection between the furniture we are designing and its potential to make people think and feel in a particular way,” he says.
Can seating truly influence the way we behave? Mark draws my attention to where we are sitting right now, outside this coffee shop. The chairs are plastic and metal constructions, easily cleaned, stackable, light, and, I’m guessing, affordable. They are plainly not intended to deliver lasting comfort – perhaps that’s a boon to a busy coffee shop owner that prefers frequent customer turnover.
Mark points out how we’ve arranged ourselves around the small table. It would be traditional to sit opposite one another – or, in certain bench seating arrangements, side by side. Due to space constraints, we’re actually adjacent – a halfway house between these two norms. It’s not the most comfortable of arrangements – our feet knock against each other and our backs are to the road – but it’s less formal than it could be.
“Our seating arrangement has a fundamental influence upon the way we’re interacting now,” says Mark, who typically prefers to sit alongside his company. “For me, sitting opposite someone is always vaguely confrontational – often, you end up sitting closer to the stranger beside you than the person you’re dining with. Is it not more interesting to look at someone obliquely rather than directly? To feel that you are side by side?”
He references the furniture of the 19th century Biedermeier style, in which objects often took on new roles in the home – Mark owns a two-seater Biedermeier sofa ideal for dining in his preferred manner.
“Design is in a strange place at the moment,” he complains. “There seems to be an interminable requirement for ‘new’. I wonder who is pushing that process?
“When I started out in the 90s, I was lucky – there was an extraordinary thirst for a contemporary aesthetic. People were still buying dodgy reproduction design tables because, unlike in countries such as Italy and France, there was no aesthetic hinterland to inform their tastes. On the high street, you only really had Habitat pushing trends.
“Then, you suddenly had an explosion of designer-makers, and people had an alternative to secondhand reproductions. As a designer, you began to hear feedback. You enjoyed direct appreciation for your work.
“Underpinning the design process was the importance of understanding people – who, what, and where were the users? Surrounding this was the unsaid – do these people get on or not? Are they living a perfect life?
“Suddenly, design was hitting on the sensibilities beneath it all, and striving to appreciate the importance of everything apart from the function of a piece of furniture. That understanding is probably what got me to where I am now.”
Today’s young designers may not be so lucky, Mark admits. Treading the line between creativity and commercial value is difficult at the best of times, but the industry has changed a great deal since the 90s, and Mark has grown weary of its more cynical aspects.
“The last thing the world needs is another chair,” he states. “All too often, people try to make ‘new’ for the sake of new, without asking whether it actually performs well. It’s easy to shock, but much more difficult to please.”
In Mark’s opinion, a good design should speak for itself. He’s tired of the marketing noise that surrounds many of today’s products, and argues that purity of concept is often lost beneath layers of narrative and branding.
“I love the idea of rediscovering the innocence of the unbranded, the unmarketed, the non pre-conceived – the intrinsic value of an item,” he says. “Marketing needs to recognise the central character of an object, rather than treating it as though it’s a blank piece of paper that needs wrapping up in commercial viability.”
It may sound a strange guilty pleasure, but Mark confesses that he’s “never happier” than when perusing products in foreign supermarkets – referencing Mr. Bricolage, a French ironmongery and DIY store, in particular. An inability to read the labels or context of foreign objects imparts a measure of naivety that Mark truly enjoys.
“I’m acutely aware that good products don’t sell themselves,” he admits, “but the process needs to be based on a design that genuinely tries to do something better than what came before it.”
Such an approach has very real design implications. “Let’s be realistic, a chair won’t change the world – but we are at least trying to do work that can make a little bit of difference,” he says.
Nomad, Gloster (2012)
Despite his reputation for embracing new materials and manufacturing technologies, in an age of rapid prototyping and fast-moving fashions the designer’s approach remains defiantly deliberate and considered. “Prototypes need to be seen and felt, in person,” he says, “even if it means a lot of travel.”
A former mentor at Bucks New University, Mark was sad to hear that the institution’s practical furnituremaking course will no longer run. The potential loss of the focused, hands-on elements of the syllabus – so central to the designer-maker approach of Mark’s youth – reflects a more general movement away from the workshop and into the studio.
“I really support the idea of giving people total creative freedom,” says Mark, “but it needs solid grounding – in manufacturing techniques, materials and commercial realities. At some stage in their career every designer will have to find a way around prices, and understanding a company’s manufacturing capabilities is the best way of avoiding unexpected design constraints.”
But surely some manufacturing developments make the future an exciting prospect?
Mark is characteristically slow to answer. “For me, it’s more about the refinement of everything that’s been there before rather than one particular innovation,” he says. “It’s not injection moulding, foam moulding, casting or extrusion, but the 10% that’s been added to those processes – the ability to push the boundaries further.
“It’s finer techniques for woodworking, more accurate machining of steel components, combinations of metals in castings, or the development of materials for outdoor use, such as upholstery fabrics made from plaster derivatives.”
Following up his last example, Mark points at the building works in progress across the road, and hints at some of the outdoor furniture work he’s carried out for Gloster: “Textilene is essentially PVC – we’ve made guttering out of it for years.”
So where do these developments leave the Gabbertas Studio? As Mark explained earlier, his escape to the country reflects a desire to focus his attentions. imm cologne and Maison&Objet 2017 will see the designer launch new products through Gloster, before further creations are unveiled during Clerkenwell Design Week and the London Design Festival, but there’s a sense of brakes being applied, and the start of a new quest for design purity.
“We’re working on some products right now that are based on a totally different business model – perhaps involving a few self-manufactured models,” admits Mark. “It’s going to be nice to design products with even greater integrity.”
The prospect of Brexit promises to lend weight to locally-manufactured goods, and it’s an area Mark is keen to further explore. “Manufacturing has been a dirty word in the UK for too long,” he says. “It wasn’t so long ago that the UK seemed destined to become a service economy – but there are limits to pushing bits of paper around!
“Although in specific terms I can’t see Brexit having much impact on my business, it will add resonance to the idea of British manufacturing, and increase the attraction of processing and sourcing materials in the UK.
“I’d like to think we will start to value ‘Britishness’ more, from a design perspective. A truly authentic British brand – sourced from and made in Britain, cradle to grave – will be much more pertinent,” he says, before wryly adding: “People are just going to have to get used to spending more money on quality products!”
Mark has noticed that different parts of the market are reacting to the prospect of Brexit in very different ways. “A lot of products at the top end of the market are being sold as fashion – it’s extraordinary,” he says. “And who is to say which trends will stand the test of time? Will the current predilection for vintage styles prove to be a real appreciation of what has gone before, or turn out to be just another ironic take on fashion?”
Ominous clouds begin to gather as we conclude our conversation. I thank the designer for his time, and wish him luck for the future. For a moment, Mark is visibly struck by the significance of his impending move, and, for once, is lost for words. “I normally plan my life quite well,” he says, “but this feels … quite …”
Although this new start has been approaching for five years, it’s hard to see how Mark could have taken any other path right now. If he’s searching for context, integrity and emotion, I sincerely believe the Cotswolds will be good for the designer’s soul – and isn’t that what all of us should strive for?
This article was published in the January 2017 issue of Furniture News magazine, and was conducted in November 2016.
