I’m at a point in my life where I’m team stools over chairs, and I truly believe stools deserve to be given way more credit than they get. Stools are often overlooked, maybe because they occupy minimum space, and aren’t really overbearing. But these traits are what make stools so great in my opinion! I mean, they’re compact, and a great space-saving furniture option for our modern homes. They are also super portable. And one such innovative stool design I recently came across is the Mask Stool by Mater.
Designer: Mater
Design brand Mater designed the ‘Mask Stool’. Now, what makes the Mask stool so unique or special? It’s the fact, that it has been built using the spent grain from brewery Carlsberg’s beer production, at the Danish film festival 3 Days of Design. The stool was displayed as a part of the brand’s Circular Design Exhibition at the hotel Villa Copenhagen in Copenhagen. It was designed by Danish architect Eva Harlou.
The Mask Stool is built using a sustainable design technology that was developed by Mater. Mater developed this technology alongside the Danish Technological Institute and the University of Copenhagen. The technology merges and mixes fiber-based materials with plastic waste. The spent grain leftover from Carlsberg’s beer production process is called ‘mask’ in Danish. This leftover material was used to create the stool. The wet fiber-based material left behind from the production process is dried up and then merged with a granulate of plastic waste, to produce a mixture that can be molded and transformed into furniture.
“It’s not only challenging, but it’s also very interesting because now we know how to do this. Now we can use not only the spent grain but also coffee beans and wood chips. This production method is unlimited. We can scale it up and do collaborations with all kinds of different industries to take their waste and turn it into great design,” said Eva Harlou. Discovering and developing this material took a lot of trial and error, and time on the part of the designers. Once they achieved this new material and got it right, it opened up the portal to discover a whole bunch of new materials.
