Driving through outback Australia, the rusty form of the corrugated iron shed is a fixture of the low country skyline. It’s this skyline that Adam Brislin grew up looking at as a child, surrounded by farmland in the south-west of Western Australia.
Years later – and 10 years after he co-founded design brand Beeline Design with partner Lucy Grant – these nostalgic forms are reinvented as Ridge, a new furniture collection marked by seamless details, clean lines and luxury materials.
Ridge launched at contemporary design event Denfair in June, marking a departure from the timber-driven designs the company has created in the past. The new range comprises six pieces – a bed, buffet, stool, side table, coffee table and bench seat – that put Brislin and Grant’s respective backgrounds as a cabinetmaker and product designer to good use.
“We wanted to do it in a way that was very clean, with no visible screws and very minimal lines,” says Grant. “We wanted to figure out how to join without welding, and without joining … Corrugated iron is an interesting material in the way that it’s a textural material but it’s also quite utilitarian.”
Grant had the idea of covering the pieces in leather to give a softly pleated effect, or there’s a powder-coat option in seven colours that hark back to the Australian landscape: pale Eucalypt green, deep ocean, grey, smoke blue, pink, white and black. You can mix and match elements in many of the pieces too. Top surfaces come in Tasmanian oak, Carrara marble or blush terrazzo. All of the materials are Australian with the exception of the marble and terrazzo stones, which are from Italy.
“It [took] a lot of research and development to get to this point,” Grant says. “But we worked out how to bend the metal into shapes … adding leather to give it some luxe looks. Something that was associated with a garden shed suddenly becomes a luxury piece.”
