Uniform disks of wood and foam, stacked into a simple geometry, the layers left exposed. Pipe Dreams, by Douglas & Company, takes the way a CLT panel is made and turns it into furniture – a daybed, a bench and an ottoman, all built from surplus materials.
Pipe Dreams, by Cape Town studio Douglas & Company, is built from the timber left over when a construction project finishes – cross-laminated panels that would otherwise be scrapped – and from chip foam, the material made by bonding leftover foam pieces back into a usable block. The waste came first, and then the daybed, bench and ottoman followed.
“Conceiving of and launching a collection amidst omnipresent uncertainty felt like a fanciful scheme at first,” says Liani Douglas, one half of the duo. The pieces answer that uncertainty with plump curves and strong geometry – uniform disks of wood and foam stacked into simple forms, with the layers left exposed, not shying away from what its original life was.
In these pieces, the CLT brings both structure and aesthetic. The panels are built from 20–40-millimetre timber boards bonded under pressure in perpendicular layers, a process that lends coniferous softwood real stability and load capacity. Douglas & Company takes this layered fabrication into an aesthetic form, building each piece up the way the panel itself is made. A touch of blush pink leather softens the stack, while the timber and foam are left to showcase their raw finish.
There’s an ease to the way the collection handles these materials. The CLT and chip foam carry their backstory confidently, but the appeal comes from the process and design narrative – the stacked geometry, the soft curves, the layers left open to view.
