sexy stumps to seats...

we love a good bit of upcycling here in the claire potter design studio, and we were delighted when we 'stumpled' (ho ho) over these very delicious stools.

made by Ubico Studio, the 'oli' stool is part of the 'stump' series which are all constructed from the small sections of offcut timber discarded by local carpenters.

good eh? what makes the product even better is that Ubico have passed some of the production onto a factory project which employs disabled workers - thus creating the stool into a socially involved piece of furniture.

lovely.

and we particularly love the industrial strap which bands the piece. very tasty indeed.

an evening at the Greenpower Centre...

Those of you who follow the studio on twitter would have seen a few tweets about a very nice event we attended last week.

Well, as things have been a little hectic this week (more news on this week to follow) we have only just got round to retelling the evening.

Organised by the wonderful South Coast Design Forum, this evening was affectionately called the 'summer do' and was an excuse to meet up in a brand new 'eco' location, eat some snacks, drink some wine and have a good old chinwag.

It was a very lovely evening.

First off we had a little tour of the building, which was built by Fordingbridge on their site as a showcase building to show clients their work, and has been rented on very reasonable terms to local engineering charity, Greenpower.

With a myriad of green technologies, the building functions as both an excellent and beautiful example of sustainable architecture.

Rainwater harvesting, passive solar gain and solar control canopies and external blinds feature on the exterior of the locally sourced glulam timber building, along with the simplest of green roofs I have ever seen. Awash with wildflowers and a few, erm, weeds, we were informed that the waste soil from the project was, well, plonked back on top of the roof with a scattering of seeds. However low-tech, it seems to be working very well indeed, and I will be very interested to see how the strip of pumpkins develop into the autumn...

Inside, the large thermal mass of the concrete foundation and floor helps to regulate temperature very simply, whilst a ultra high tech lighting system (with no wall switches) turns lighting on and off relative to the outside light levels and where you are in the building. Clever stuff.

A ceiling mounted electrical rig allows for a flexible working environment, and a separate mezzanine level is accessed via this truly beautiful bamboo staircase.

A wonderful evening in an inspirational building.

white night Brighton 2010...

a very quick post - we are very excited in the studio as we have been selected to produce an installation for the forthcoming White Night Brighton on 30 Oct 2010...

more details to follow (once we have stopped jumping about).

expect wind powered LED's, patterns of nature and an old boat...

taxidermy illuminations...

One good thing about the web is the myriad of items you will find, from imaginative minds across the world, every single day.


Yesterday, I found these fantastic lights. Even though they bordered on the very macabre, I was completely enthralled by them:


Found via Inhabitat, these lamps and lights are made by bespoke lighting designer Alex Randall from (already deceased) stuffed animals, which appear to be carrying the lights in their hands or beaks.

Harking back to the Victorian obsession with the collection and cataloguing of the natural world, the lamps feature squirrels, ducks and pigeons.

En masse, they look quite spectacular, if not a tiny bit unsettling.

Randall talks about the beauty of the animals we treat with such disdain, and how this beauty should be both recognised and celebrated.

so, we are looking forward to the possibility of seagull streetlamps illuminating the roads of Brighton?

giving paint a newlife...

I love my job.

I get to meet some really interesting people and specify some fantastic stuff to create some brilliant spaces. Wednesday was no exception as I had a mid week jaunt to the base of a very interesting paint company.

Many of you would have seen me (or heard me) talking about organic, low VOC, natural etc paint, but I have never talked about, or indeed found, recycled paint.

Not quite an alien concept as it sounds, there are groups which collect the waste remnants of paint that have been taken to recycling points at refuse collection sites across the UK and pass them onto charities through various community repaint projects.

But even with these sterling efforts, approximately 50 million litres of paint end up in landfill every year.

Step in Newlife paints.

They take all the recycled paints in (via the aforementioned recycling points), stack the cans into colour batches, then remix them in large blue containers to create a whole new batch of paint. This is then filtered, processed and repackaged for use as brand new paint.

As well as their standard 20 colours, they are also able to colour match paint to the customers requirements - all using paint which would otherwise be festering in landfill.

We think they are doing a sterling job with a real problem waste product - this really is upcycling at its best!

go check them out here...

STOP PRESS....... Just heard from Amy that Newlife Paints were awarded the Best Recycled Product 2010 at yesterdays National Recycling Awards - Well done Newlife!

compARTments and MESH...

After my little sneaky peek post yesterday and my telling off for being soooo unfair, I have decided to reveal a little more about what we are doing and have done recently in the studio. It is not ground breaking, but we have been and continue to be excited by the below. Hopefully you will too...

First up - the University of Sussex Product Design Degree Show - you may remember from a couple of posts ago that we had made, and were sponsoring an award and were hot footing it up to Falmer to bestow the 'best eco design' award onto one of the very deserving students.

Well, the winner we selected was Kerry Norwood for her project MESH (Major Emergency Sustainable Housing). This is a truly worthy 'eco' project in so many ways. Using readily available metal sections and mesh sheets, Kerry designed a modular house kit which can be fitted, in multiples, into a standard sized shipping container.

Created for use in sudden emergency situations, the MESH unit can be put together quickly and simply, with the addition of an internal plastic sheet ensuring that the house is weatherproof. The gabion like walls begin empty, but are designed to be filled with the rubble and detritus of the collapsed homes, allowing a new life to be literally built from the remnants of the old.

Its humanitarian and aid advantages are obvious, but it was the beautifully simple eloquence of the 'rebuilding' aspect which I particularly loved. To give someone the chance to help themselves - a new purpose in the chaos - is strikingly powerful.

Kerry is now deciding how to take this project forward, so I will post a little more (including some images) as soon as I am able.

Next - compARTment.

Over the past two weeks, we have become involved in a very exciting project in Brighton, with the compARTment team - a group of makers, designers and artists who are committed to rejuvenating the empty spaces around the city.

The pilot project is utilising two empty units in the soon-to-be-redeveloped Open Market in Brighton - filling them temporarily with a series of art installations, exhibitions and pop up spaces. Running from now until September or October this year, it is hoped that the varied activities will increase the footfall to the market, supporting the remaining stallholders.

We have become involved in the project in a few capacities - helping with some of the set up organisation bits, possibly designing some spaces for other people and actually creating a couple of installations ourselves.

Heard of pop-up shops? Well, we are going to have a pop-up studio - creating an exciting little space to call home for a week, where the good people of Brighton can come and say hello and talk to us about more exciting little (or large) spaces.

So there you go - two little things that we have done and are doing - both of which will be filled out with more info over the next few weeks!

And the solar and wind powered installations? Well, I am afraid that is one for next week. I haven't drawn them up yet.

watch this (previously empty) space...

we have been away, but like Arnie, we are back and with a lot to tell...

some bits are still embargoed, but there will be news VERY soon about a couple of very interesting little projects we are currently involved in.

empty spaces? pop up shops and exhibitions? temporary installations? solar and wind powered lighting creations?

coming soon to an empty space in Brighton soon...

that was the week that was...

Last week was pretty hectic here in the studio. there were a series of deadlines, a juggling of projects, an award to be awarded and two out-of-the-office trips.

It started relatively calmly, creating the outline concept for a new urban front garden for a gentleman on the sunny south coast. minimalist, lots of hedges and a variety of textural grasses and clipped forms. At the end of my scribbling I realised that it looked just like a screenshot from that good old '90's wonder, Tetras. I liked it very much. Fortunately, so did our client, so we are now pressing on with constructional drawings.

Next, we had to make an award. Not to go on our shelf you understand, but to be awarded to a graduate on the University of Sussex Product Design degree show - to the person, who, in our humble opinion could wear the badge of 'Best Eco Design 2010'.

We looked around the studio and found some bits and bobs and assembled this:

Made from recycled plastic with bank notes in, a hugely water damaged book, some screws and threaded rod and an old set of printers blocks. We were quite pleased with the finished effort.

So we then had to decide who was going to receive our assembled award, so I trundled up to the Falmer site of the University of Sussex to view the Innovate 2010 show.

I was blown away. The quality and range of projects was truly excellent and after much umming and aarhing I whittled it down to four very notable eco designs. And after even more umming I finally selected the winner.......(to be continued...)

Thursday found me whizzing up to Birmingham where the ever eclectic Gardeners' World Live show was squeezed into the stale halls and concrete expanses of the NEC, which has to be one of the most depressing places in all of the UK.

Once I had parked my car (to the tune of £8) and reminded myself that I was not in some technicolour 80's theme park I started to enjoy the show.

I loved the Girl Guides garden - there was something about the repetitional structure of the quote sticks against the waft of the wildflowers which particularly drew me in. Other lovelies included the rose Re-Bound garden by Andy Tudbury where I was allowed to sit on the pristine white bench and take in the scent that was captured in the space. The dappled shade on the hedges was lovely and the lawn was so flat you could have ironed a perfect crease on your trousers using it as a base.

I also caught up with Tom and Malcolm at Hooksgreen Herbs, and I was over the moon to hear that they were given a Gold medal for their exhibit. I was chuffed to bits for them and got a very stern look from the BBC film crew when I squealed with delight at the news.

Inside the sheds I found the fantastic James Alexander-Sinclair, who was working harder than a donkey on Blackpool beach in summer in the darkest corner of the NEC you could possibly find. Not the most inspiring of places, but James was lighting up the bleakness with his bright and sharp wit so no head torches were required.

After battling my way out of the car park I rumbled diagonally down the country to the lovely little market town of Bromyard where I was staying for the night before my Friday at the Three Counties Show.

The little sections I did see of Bromyard were lovely, which included my lovely little room in the beautiful Bay Horse pub on the High Street. A stunning oak beamed 16th C coach house, The Bay Horse was so full of character you could make a fortune bottling it and selling it to tourists. Everything was wonky, crittall windows creaked in the sun and it oozed history. Coffee in hand, I sat down and watched Gareth at Glyndebourne (which took me back a few years to when I was at music college) and relaxed for the first time in an age.

Breakfast was excellent, with a no-fuss vegetarian option and nice toast in a beautiful section of the dining room downstairs. Thank you to all of the Bay Horse - I can highly recommend it for a stay if you are around those parts...

A mini rally drive down to Malvern and I was at my second home, the Three Counties Showground for the Three Counties Show in watery sunshine.

I headed straight for our 25th Anniversary Garden, which had been developing over the last 5 weeks since it's first outing at the Spring Show. Like a proud mother hen, I clucked around the space, smiling at how lovely the Stipa tenuissima looked, how the fennel had developed into smokey bronze clouds and how the spots of alliums drew the eyes from one section of the garden to another.

Today, Monday the 21st June, it will be dismantled forever.

But, that is what happens with showgardens, they are fleeting.

After taking far too many photos, I wandered around the show with a massive handwoven willow dragonfly I had bought as a Father's Day present for my Dad and eventually met up with the beautiful and fabulous Nina Acton and the very lovely Mark Diacono who I had met a bit before. We all continued around the show, tasting some lovely beer, talking about yellow courgettes and buying more huge dragonflies made from willow. It was grand.

The drizzle signalled my departure from Worcestershire and after shoehorning the dragonflies into the car I whizzed back down south, with a brief delay on the ever predictable and accident laden M25.

What a week.

guerillas in our midst...

as the last post mentions, we have recently updated our website - something which was widely overdue but one of those things you just don't get around to doing.

Personal marketing is something that we all do without even realising (wearing particular clothes to display our affections to a certain genre, wearing a particular 'smell' to attract a certain type of person etc etc) .

Business marketing is a slightly different (and usually much more costly) to undertake. And if you are a business trying to be as 'green' as possible, the avenues become even more thinned out. Blanket flyers to a thousand homes and businesses may be a no no, even if they are recycled.

So are there ways of spreading the word about your business or cause in a different way?

Of course there are - guerilla marketing is a movement that we have all experienced in some way or another (from graffiti to empty spaces being transformed into temporary gardens) and there are a few people who are really trying to green up the whole consumerist world of information transfer.

We are in the process of starting our own eco guerilla marketing campaign, and we found a lot of inspiration from these guys.

watch this space for our little installations which should be popping up around Brighton in the next two months or so...

new website alert...

I have been pondering the new website design for a little while, but finally, we have got it all finished and it is now live.

visit the sleeker, updated content website here - www.clairepotterdesign.com.