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ethan Laura Wood describes her London
studio in two words: “Stuff. Everywhere.”
She’s not wrong. Shelves brim with
prototypes, found objects, and realized
designs, from woven-scoubidou bottles
and faux-marble bins that she picked
up at the pound shop (dollar store) to her
recent tea set for Rosenthal and table
lamps for Nilufar. “I’m a very visual and
tactile person,” Wood explains. “Something from the flea
market might inspire my next project.”
Since she launched her firm in 2010, Wood’s avant-garde
approach to materiality, color, and pattern—a philosophy that
extends to her always-theatrical outfits—has garnered a cult
following, particularly among the fashion crowd. Hermès
requested displays for its U.K. store windows, which she filled
with extra-large fruit in 2014. The next year, when Tory Burch
commissioned a riff on Dodie Thayer’s iconic lettuceware,
Wood came back with sculptures made to look like oversize
canapés. And just last year, after the accessories brand Valextra
tapped her for a line of handbags, Wood delivered squiggly
handles and clasps that look squeezed from a toothpaste tube.
During a visit to her studio this past June, garlands of
translucent PVC wisteria hang from a metal frame. “It’s like a
greenhouse-meets-herbarium,” she explains of the scenography,
titled HyperNature, part of a traveling series commissioned
by Perrier-Jouet that made its London debut at the Masterpiece
fair in June. Wood considered working with glass, a nod to
Émile Gallé, the Art Nouveau artist who designed the cham-
pagne producer’s iconic label. But when she realized the transit
problems posed by the fragile material, she came up with an
alternative: water jet–cut, hand-dyed plastic.
“I’m taking something seen as throwaway and using it as
something precious,” she explains of the material, which shealso used for a line of limited-edition lighting that launched
in April. That idea has always been central to her practice. In
2010, fresh from the Royal College of Art, where she’d studied
under legends like Jurgen Bey and Martino Gamper, Wood
landed a residency at the Design Museum in London. They
asked for work in response to the museum’s then home, a
former banana warehouse in the rapidly gentrifying Butler’s
Wharf area. “I liked the idea of abstracting an industrial mate-
rial like particle board,” says Wood, who created case goods
covered, to painstaking precision, in laminate marquetry that
immediately got the design world’s attention.
“Bethan’s practice is incredibly innovative because she
combines traditional techniques like marquetry with contem-
porary materials,” says Nilufar’s Nina Yashar, who bought
a stool from the Particle collection and gave Wood a show at
her Milan gallery the next year. They’ve been collaborating
ever since. The work is now part of the designer’s ongoing
Super Fake collection, comprising laminate-marquetry tables
and cabinets made to look like geodes and terrazzo, as well
as woodgrain-patterned carpets for cc-tapis. “I kind of get
stuck on series,” she explains, launching into an ode to fake
fruit, an obsession she inherited from her mother, who
collected it. After that XL fruit salad for Hermès, Wood made
a marble table with Budri that was inlaid with the vermiculate
motif of melon skin. A collaboration with Barbini, storied
producer of Venetian glass mirrors, launching this month,
is also “melon inspired.”
Wood’s fixations play out in different ways. She spots
something in her studio or photo reel (“Once I noticed I had
taken 30 pictures of railings”) and it finds a way into the
work. Those sinuous rails became the handle of a purse, then
a teapot. “I have trouble throwing things away,” she admits.
“But I can look at five random objects on a shelf and tell you
how each of them connects to a project.”GIANT FRUIT FOR HERMÈS, VESSELS FOR
BITOSSI, TEA SETS FOR ROSENTHAL, AND INSPIRATIONAL
FOUND OBJECTS FILL WOOD’S SHELVES.
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