Shaker furniture has long been an inspiration to the design world. Guided by principles of simplicity and practicality, the minimalist furnishings created in Maine, US, in the 19th century by the United Society of Believers in Christ's Second Appearing are still revered today. Among the most distinctive and universally recognised elements of the style is the rail, a simple wooden band that follows the walls of a room, equipped with a series of pegs, onto which furniture and other interior accessories can be hung.
The Shaker style was on the minds of Elora Joshi and Andrew Greene as they were furnishing their LA apartment. A fashion executive and an artist respectively, they had decided they wanted to create some pieces for the space and landed, as Greene puts it, on ‘a design element that would constrain our ability to get too messy'. The starting point was a commercial hanging system that Greene had been using in his work.
‘It's designed for offices, hospitals and art galleries, the kinds of places where they don't want to keep having to drill into walls over and over again,' says Greene.' Installed in the domestic environment, it added a new layer to the home: ‘We could create opportunities to display some of our favourite things and then also have this utilitarian component where we could hang up clothes if we needed to get them off the floor quickly.'
What started as a personal project took a wider turn as friends started coming over and increasingly asking about the system. ‘That gave us some confidence to keep working on it and expanding the language that we were using,' says Greene. ‘It also coincided with a desire in my own creative practice to explore a more formal aspect of my work that I didn't get to explore as much in the conceptual sculpture that I was making: I wanted to just make a really beautiful space, or a room that was more concerned with architecture than ideas.'
From there, Joshi's ongoing interest in Shaker furniture and minimalist design sparked a project that has turned the couple into a fully fledged creative studio, with the aluminium system being presented as part of Convey, during this year's Milan Design Week. Visitors walking into the bare room discovered the studio's experiment with the Shaker concept: the aluminium rail punctuated the perimeters of the apartment-like space (‘like a picture frame for a room, the room itself becomes the visual interest', notes Joshi), with essential objects hanging from it. A chair, a clock, a hanger, a shelf, a mirror and a vase all featured the same rigid, minimal forms, and all were crafted in honed aluminium. ‘We were designing with some constraints where we didn't want to weld anything,' says Greene. ‘When we started, we wanted to be able to do everything in-house, cheaply and quickly.'
They use the word ‘harmonious' when describing the aesthetic they strive to create (‘we think a lot about how space is laid out and the negative space in a room as well,' says Joshi), informed by the 19thcentury American movement as much as Japanese design and a plethora of other cultural references.
For Greene, creative pillars include 1980s crime films: ‘I have a catalogue of hundreds of them that I keep coming back to, and the LA locations depicted in those films are often the ones we think about designing for.' Joshi, meanwhile, looks both to 1990s British design (from Jasper Morrison to John Pawson and Claudio Silvestrin), as well as the South Asian ephemera that is part of her Indian background, from ‘Buddhas to really rich fabrics, that seep slightly in some of our work; those are the objects that inhabit the world we are building.'
Meanwhile, both designers are adamant that the rail system, with its limitations and opportunities, is where the studio's attention is focused at the moment, and the idea is to expand further on the concept. ‘It obviously operates as this kind of modular system, but we do think about it as an architectural device and a design element,' says Greene. ‘Our dream is to be able to think through what that rail could look like for clients, whether that's bar tables hanging off of it, or perhaps for a retail store. There are so many opportunities, and because we created it originally for our home, now we need those situations to design for.'
