Roughed Up: Rabih Hage Designs Revisited
London, England
25 September - 26 October 2009
Rabih Hage launches a collection of furniture that reveals a new and unexpected beauty.
To coincide with this year’s London Design Festival, Rabih Hage is presenting his latest collection in an exhibition entitled ‘Roughed Up: Rabih Hage Designs Revisited’.
Following in the footsteps of Hage’s highly coveted and most recent interiors project, the Rough Luxe Hotel, London, this new collection is one designed and created by Rabih Hage to capture the same concept.
Each piece of furniture – including the Tonneau Chair, Bucket Sofa, Wine Bench, and Miles – has been carefully selected from the Rabih Hage furniture collection and revisited to give it a new and unique edge. ‘Like a painter, who takes out an existing canvas and reworks it, each piece in this collection will be updated to reveal a new and raw beauty.’
According to Rabih Hage: ‘Beauty is subjective: perfection doesn’t mean beauty, it’s not important. What makes something great is its relevance to our lives and individual emotions. The material side is irrelevant.’
On discovering some of these pieces you might be forgiven for thinking that they are not quite finished but this is the style of this collection – a fascinating blend of partially sanded surfaces, bare wood, chipped paint and rough edges mingled with opulent contemporary materials and exquisite quality.
The idea for this collection evolved when renovating the Rough Luxe Hotel, King’s Cross, London. Working on this project Rabih came across many restrictions due to it being a listed building. While peeling away layers of wallpaper he revealed a sense of heritage and history which intrigued him and led him to embrace this urban ‘archaeology’ rather than cover it up. With this new collection the same concept applies. Through this deconstructed style Rabih wishes to celebrate the contrasts and layers which make an object and which also, to him, represent the multi-faceted character of the objects history.
