SUPERSAIL WORLD 20 JULY-SEPTEMBER 2018
GEAR
ESSENCE OF STRENGTH
This gravity defying, striking carbon furniture from a new British company could well be the ‘must have’
items for superyacht owners in 2018. Sam Fortescue looks at the elements that made it fall into placehen Clive Johnson wound
down Magma Structures, the
Portsmouth-based composite
specialist had just delivered the
100m freestanding rig for Andrey
Melnichenko’s game-changing Sailing Yacht A.
The masts were three unstayed carbon fibre
masts – the largest ever built and together
capable of supporting a sail area bigger than
a football pitch.
Where do you go after such a project? Well,
Johnson has fallen back on the entrepreneurial
instincts that saw him set up and sell Tacktick
instruments. This time, he has lowered his
gaze to the deck in a new collaboration with
designer Kristian Arens to deliver the world’s
coolest carbon-fibre furniture under the brand
Essence of Strength.“The contemporary, gravity defying
furniture uses natural curves to deliver
inherent strength, while the advanced
composite materials enable cantilevered forms
that defy normal design parameters,” Johnson
explained. Those same curves also make thefurniture surprisingly comfortable to support
varying human postures. “The carbon fibre
also feels strangely warm.”
Each piece of furniture is assembled using
largely prepreg unidirectional carbon, over
a CNC-milled plug. It’s a technique that is
similar to that used to build spars. And before
anything goes into the tooling, it’s already been
modelled on a computer using finite element
analysis – just as you would for a mast.
The calling card here is the chaise longue,
whose deep seat is so thin and so heavily
cantilevered that it seems impossible it will
bear any weight at all. Tiny leather pads on the
backrest are so fine they also seem incapable
of offering support. But this is an illusion –
the chair is strong enough to take someone
weighing up to 150kg. Dozens of prototypes,ABOVE: ARENS (LEFT)
AND JOHNSON
LEFT: AHEAD OF THE
CURVE, THESE COBRA BAR
STOOLS HAVE BECOME
A COVETED PIECE
OF FURNITUREW