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Rubber rooms: designers using latex in cool home furnishings
RUBBER ROOMS: DESIGNERS USING LATEX IN COOL HOME FURNISHINGS
Rubber rooms aren’t exactly a new concept. It isn’t that unusual for latex clothing brands to include some latex soft furnishings such as sheets, pillow cases and duvet covers in their ranges — Libidex for example offers exactly those items in its own Latex Bed Set.
And custom-designed rubber rooms that include latex shower curtains etc as part of an environment focused on rubberist activities are frequent features of both professional and private dungeons.
But! But! If you’d told us that, in mid-May, an august publication like Elle Decoration would be running a substantial feature entitled 9 buys that prove why latex is the latest fetish for homes, we’d probably have assumed you’d been at the jungle juice again.
Top of page: Tremella Latex Armchair, designed by Ziyu He (shown below left in the top thumbnail)
But it’s true! Journalist Alice Finney managed to sniff out nine designers who evidently passed the sniff test by sharing one thing in common: almost every item featured in her article employed natural latex — the stuff that is basically transparent or semi-transparent and has a milky cream-to-amber hue that can become more pronounced in thicker gauges of the material.
Lamps employing latex in different ways actually constitute three of the nine pieces selected for Finney’s article, and first of the two we’re featuring here is NYC-based Natalie Tischler’s Ghost Lamp (£1,470) — shown above with bulbs switched on and off to illustrate how different they look in a darkened and daylit room.
Fortunately, modern light bulbs such as LED units emit a minimal amount of heat compared with traditional incandescent bulbs, and only trace amounts of ultra violet light, otherwise a latex lampshade would probably have quite a short service life!
From reading about the various designers whose work is featured in the Elle Decoration article, it does look as if a couple of them at least have some appreciation of the role of latex in fetish and BDSM.
One design duo in particular — Erica Seller and Jeremy Silberberg of Brooklyn-based Studio S II (above, centre) — are featured for their Subdermal II Pendant Lamp (£3,120) which they confirm is an overt reference to the kind of human suspension by flesh-hooks that sometimes features in performances at fetish events.
As previously, the lamp (which can also be suspended horizontally) is shown (above left and right) in both dark and bright settings to illustrate how its appearance changes when on or off. “If this pendant light makes you feel uncomfortable, its designers have done something right,” says Alice Finney.
Seating also features prominently in the Elle Decoration latex selection. The gorgeous piece shown at the top of this page is the Tremella Latex Armchair by New York-based Ziyu He. If you’re thinking how nice it might be to sit in it and experience the organic embrace of its form (inspired by snow fungus, we hear), that experience would no doubt be enhanced by knowing that what you’d be sitting in costs a cool £26,500.
Perhaps a more affordable seating option, at a mere £1,450, would be the Latex, Latex, Latex chair by Eindhoven Design Academy graduate Mai Rødtnes (above right). Mai created three modular variants for her graduation project, which are all shown above, along with the designer herself.
Mai says the project “explores the versatile, noble and sustainable nature of latex, a material with the potential to replace environmentally harmful materials such as leather and plastics”, and thus “highlights latex’s potential in furniture design”. In each version, the latex is affixed to the stainless steel frames by buttons so it can be easily replaced if needed.
Finally, we look towards Melbourne for the work Elle Decoration featured by Australian creative director Marsha Golemac, above. Her latex-covered stainless steel Ekran Screen, left (from £3,500) represents her “investigation into the boundaries between utility and allure”, pursued in this case by replacing the traditional opaque screen fabric with semi-trans latex.
Perusing her Insta, we discovered that she had also created a companion piece, the Ličan Wall Cabinet, which replaces the more familiar mirrored door with a thick flap of natural rubber — in that deep amber shade we mentioned earlier — and a magnetic closure at the bottom.
The items featured above have all been made, often as one-offs, for a market that can afford to invest in designer pieces of this kind. But, as with many such objets aimed at a fairly exclusive market, if they start a design trend, you might one day find some similar-looking items — complete with latex elements — in your nearest IKEA. Stranger things have happened!
See the full Elle Decoration latex selection in Alice Finney’s article here.