Flat-pack furniture. It doesn’t have great connotations and probably conjures up memories of your first piece of furniture in your first University share house that survived until the first party. But New Zealand designer Nathan Goldsworthy delved into history to discover the much more appealing origins of flat-pack.
“The first flat packed furniture was designed to be used on the field of battle,” Goldsworthy explains. In fact, he found out that Napoleon utilised the original flat-pack to take along his entire office set-up (including shelves).
So Goldsworthy’s approach was to build a simple table of 10 pieces that requires no Allen key and no screws to put together – all out of beautiful solid white oak. And so we have the ‘Adjutant’ table; adjutant being a military rank for someone supporting a senior officer (gold! We love it!).
There may not be an immediate need to rush to battle with this particular table, but you can assemble and disassemble it as many times as you like.
You have to love the way the table has been photographed, like sublime assembly instructions. We’re told the reversible table-top comes in wenge, sycamore, white ash, walnut, rock maple and white oak veneers with the PVC edge coming in 12 colours.
The table is currently available in New Zealand from Corporate Culture in Auckland and Backhouse Furniture in Wellington, with a shipment on its way to Australia (for Corporate Culture) as we speak!
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