Canadian studio Odami has used wood from a 130-year-old red oak tree to design furniture and lighting.
Odami is an architectural, interior, and furniture design studio founded in Toronto founded in 2017 by Spanish architect Aránzazu González Bernardo and Canadian designer Michael Norman Fohring. Its previous projects include Toronto restaurant Sara, which features curving plaster walls.
Odami worked with Patrick Murphy, owner of One Wood, a woodworking company to realise the three unique pieces that aim to explore the concept of mass.
The tree came from Murphy's parents' property in St Anns, Ontario. One of its limbs had already fallen and rotted, but the team was able to preserve a majority of its main trunk and use it to create the pieces.
After the red oak was chopped down, the wood was dried and then cut into the new shapes causing it to stretch, warp and crack. In total, the fabrication process was carried out over a period of eight months.
On the lamp, light shines through the thin opening between a square-shaped rod and rounded column that front the piece. A rectangular block forms the top and base of the prism-shaped work.
The curved seat and straight-edged back of the armchair are set at angles from one another and attach between the two rounded arms on each side of the design.
Black markings visible on the front of the seat indicate the areas where the wood stretched and cracked from being worked into the bowed shape.
The low-lying table has chunky legs attached to its centre. A flat surface extends beyond the two legs to form the tabletop. In this middle is a small lid that lifts off the top to reveal a tiny compartment built into the table.
.jpg)
