Patrick Kim-Gustafson, Face mirror, 2024
A trained industrial engineer and former furniture, fixtures, and equipment designer, Patrick Kim-Gustafson founded the Aubervilliers-based Ateljé Loupchat in 2020. Returning to the practice of woodworking that surrounded Kim-Gustafson, growing up in Sweden allowed the designer to explore a reversal of the values he was trained in.
Kim-Gustafson begins each piece with a solid block of oak, privileging a tactile, intuitive, and subtractive way of honing the wood, counter to the logic of efficiency and primacy of function borne of software-designed items, and the general culture of disposability that surrounds our relationship with objects. The result is a series of "completely anarchic" and paradoxically utilitarian pieces that hover between sculpture and furniture: a 1,80m long bench with room for only one buttock carved into its center, or say, an 80kg plinth-like form that flutes upwards on its surface to hold a single pen. Vases and vanity mirrors likewise are imbued with a renewed sense of autonomy - what were once originally 130-year-old ceiling beams, decommissioned and left to rot at a scrapyard, have been salvaged and reforged by Kim-Gustafson.
Certain pieces are finished using the Japanese technique shou-sugi ban, which entails charring and then treating wood with ferric acetate. This process creates a natural sealant that thoroughly blackens the material, simultaneously transforming and preserving it.
