East London Furniture at DreamBags JaguarShoes
London Design Festival: designer-makers East London Furniture have temporarily fitted out the interior of London bar DreamBags JaguarShoes using nothing but scrap materials found on the local streets.
The fit-out is the latest in a string of installations at the venue by artists and designers. "Normally it involves mostly the walls and perhaps some lighting," East London Furniture's Christian Dillon told Dezeen. "We wanted to take over the whole bar."
The team removed all the furniture and replaced it with tables made from pallets and ceiling joists, plus benches inspired by nineteenth century Shaker furniture.
"We created all of the free-standing seating, tables and lighting in our workshop, but left the inbuilt elements to be created in situ," said Dillon. "So much of the inbuilt seating, especially the booth or 'pulpit', were conceived in the space from materials we had to hand."
The team have lined the walls and front of the counter with wooden panels, while the throne-like seating booth is made from old skirting boards and fills the recess beside a staircase.
The cube-shaped lights hanging above the bar were created from the offcuts of other furniture made by the team and the wall-mounted lighting was produced from recycled wooden blocks.
Friend and regular collaborator Alessandro Mistrulli has decorated many of the surfaces with illustrations showing severed arms and wood-working tools. "I think I saw him reading a book on Russian prison tattoos the night before he delivered the main graphic," said Dillon.
The installation will remain in place for two months, but was completed to coincide with the London Design Festival last week.
"For us to have a show in the festival, where people are actually using the furniture to have a nice meal, a nice beer or chatting to a nice girl or guy is so much more interesting than a static display of our furniture," explained Dillon.
Dillon and team mates Ben Green and Reuben Le Prevost founded the Hackney-based furniture company in 2011 - see our earlier story about them here.
A past installation we've featured at DreamBags JaguarShoes featured wallpaper that changes under different lighting conditions.
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Photography is by Jeff Metal, courtesy of JaguarShoes Collective.