Charred cork furniture collection is a chic take on the humble material

Tom Dixon, the prolific British designer behind all sorts of glam home goods and modular furniture for Ikea, is embracing an unassuming material for his latest collection. The Cork collection is made from cork, naturally, that’s been charred to a black-ish brown.

Inspired by cork floors in Dixon’s childhood home, the series elevates the material’s unpolished, DIY vibe into a much more sophisticated look. The collection includes a shelf and three tables, all of which have chunky, rounded edges that give the pieces a cozy, child-friendly softness. A material like cork also ages much better when the edges are rounded off.

Tom Dixon

According to Dixon, this version of cork required taking the pre-consumer waste material sourced from the quercus suber tree (also known as a cork tree), and granulating it before mixing it with a small amount of polyurethane resin and pressing it into boards of material. From there, the cork was charred until it reached the speckled brown hue you see here.

”We experimented with using no filler at all when we trialled the furniture in our restaurant in Milan, but people would pick out the granules and we couldn’t really let that happen with the final collection,” Dixon told Dezeen. “It can still be continually recycled, even with the resin. Combined with waste tires in can be used for flooring or playgrounds. There is pretty much no waste in the process, even the dust from the production is used to power the furnaces in the factories.”

You can check out all of the collection here.

Tom Dixon

Tom Dixon