Name: Seastian Cox

Location: London, UK

Specialist materials: Wood

Products: Furniture and various scale products.

Links [if available]: https://www.sebastiancox.co.uk/

Designer and maker Sebastian Cox and his business explicitly and articulately champion methods that support a ‘nature first’ perspective through public speaking, press and publications and of course products and processes. As co-authors of a compelling self-published manifesto, Sebastian and Brogan Cox articulate an account for wood as ‘the greatest material on earth’. “Modern life from wilder land – A manifesto for nature-first land and resource use” synthesises and cites a broad but thoughtfully and intelligently integrated range of methods from modern, regenerative agriculture, as well traditional woodcraft underpinned by rewilding aspirations. This philosophy drives a forthright agenda for the business that clearly, and often visually and materially, manifests within and through the furniture, lighting and products that they create.

Rather than dictating material requirements from design, in an industrialised fashion, they try to ‘flip it on its head’ considering what a natural landscape might yield and by using ‘clever imagination as designers’ consider what could be made within those parameters resulting in objects ‘imbued with narrative’.

Nurturing habitats alongside productivity and working with wood as a material
affords the ‘rare potential to boost biodiversity through extraction’ and the ‘accidental mimicking of mammoths’ (as a mantra). ‘The regrowth after our managed disturbance and intervention is where biodiversity increases’. The upshot is that customer relations require special consideration and are highly evaluated – customers are ‘taken on a journey’ with an expectation that those commissioning work need to embrace the philosophy and what might result. Natural variation in colour, texture and pattern, seasonality and availability of different species all need consideration when so carefully contrived as part of naturally-productive-processes. The lack of immediacy and convenience that might form the typical industrial consumer expectations need to be recalibrated if there is to be space for nature and more sustainable processes of production.

Scalability (like other makers interviewed) recognises a historic social, cultural, economic and environmental precedent for well-worked-woodlands - batch production of self-sustaining, small and medium enterprises providing for (what is hoped to be) a progressively aware market regionally is replicable countrywide. ‘How do you apply your allotment methods and care to agriculture?’ is the analogy he uses making parallel comparisons to the regenerative food movement and how that is commercially structured – regional scale operations servicing needs and demands. Reduction of ‘middle-man-margins’ and better, more direct and meaningful exchanges and relationships between makers and consumers would counter increased cost of production.

Whilst a current large-scale project is using formal surveying of nature onsite, where resources might be sought, informal observations normally feed the learning about the landscape in which they work. ‘Doing it practically yourself through logic which may be less scientific but gains practical softer sweep changes’. Sebastian readily acknowledges and appreciates the range of species in their small, four-ache wood from hornbeam, ash, wild cherry, birch and oak where archangel and cuckooflowers compliment local anecdotal stories and evidence of dormice and underlying hope and ambition that nightingales may one day take up residence.