Nature Lover Turns to Metal for New Cafe Furniture Design

Within the cafe furniture world, it is not uncommon to see wood and metal being used in conjunction to create various cafe tables and chairs. Hilla Shamia was at the end of her course at the Holon Institute of Technology and she had to choose a final project. Being a lover of nature she wanted to try and incorporate wood into her design but she wanted to use this in a different way. She wanted to create a piece of cafe furniture that not only got her a good mark but a piece that she could actually take with her after her course and into the real world of the furniture industry.

"I kept on thinking about how I find joy in nature, nature has paths and things get stuck along the way. I wanted to do the same with wood, to take it and do something to it that's never been done." Shamia decided to create furniture that has been created by wood casting. She took entire tree trunks of cypress and eucalyptus. The wood itself had been carbonised and molten metal is poured into the wood that fills every crevice of the wood, creating a unique design. This is a very complex process a and Shamia calls this process "a leakage of the aluminum into the carbonized wood".

The design for her cafe tables and chairs has been taken from a similar process that is present in nature when trees and branches fall and melt into the forest floor. No piece of furniture is the same in wood casting and she found that after experimenting she found that this form of creating furniture works best for tables and stools. So far she has only taken these pieces of furniture to a trade show in Milan where she got a very positive response.