Movie: London designer Benjamin Hubert says he and Moroso share a common interest in exploring new ways of using textiles in our penultimate video interview for the Italian furniture brand.
"Moroso is much closer to a fashion brand than it is to a furniture brand," says Hubert in the movie, which was filmed at the Moroso Loves London exhibition during London Design Festival.
"Patrizia [Moroso, creative director of the company] and I both share a passion for textile construction, unusual constructions. Things that are really engaging and new. This is what first attracted me to Moroso and I think their brand is really in line with that as well."
Hubert says it is important for him to visit the factories of the companies he works with. When he visited Moroso's production facility on the outskirts of Udine in Italy for the first time he was particularly impressed.
"When you go to see Moroso you see this reality quite beautiful production line," he explains. "They're doing things there that you just don't see at other furniture companies."
Hubert's first project for Moroso in 2013 was Talma, a chair he says is an example of "analysing and developing innovations in textile."
Unlike many upholstered chairs or sofas, Talma features a padded textile cover wrapped around a metal frame like a cloak, without the need for copious amounts of injection-moulded foam.
"Most armchairs are injected polyurethane," Hubert says. "You have to have a big tooling expense and you have to have multiple suppliers coming together to form a single product."
"We decided to strip out some of that cost and some of the risk and do something that was a bit more deconstructed [but] gave all the comfort of a traditional injected-polyurethane chair."
Hubert's first collection for Moroso also included an armchair called Cradle, which featured a hammock-like stretched textile back, as well as a series of tables made entirely of metal mesh called Net.
After experimenting with textiles and metal, wood was the focus of Hubert's 2014 Prop collection, which includes a series of sofas, chairs and coffee tables with exposed frames made from ash.
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"We designed a series of sofas and chairs, with a series of side tables as well," Hubert says. "This was really a look at solid timber and stripping out a lot of the material bulk from conventional sofa construction and exposing some of that."
He concludes: "A lot of our work involves looking at structures, construction and process and really integrating that into our products and allowing that to be worn on its skin and to be its aesthetic."
This movie was filmed at the Moroso Loves London exhibition at Moroso's London showroom on Rosebery Avenue and is part of a six-part series of exclusive video interviews with designers featured in the show.
You can watch all the movies below as we publish them.
