Benjamin Fély, Habitat Design Lab’s new gem

Connected to social networks to discover new designers, Habitat Design Lab renews the experience with Benjamin Fély, in order to promote other forms of creation, outside the industrial circuits. A follower of the slow design approach, this Nantes-based designer recovers scrap wood, old used furniture for carving, wooden spoons, flower stands, centerpieces, trays. Riding on the trend which gives pride of place to natural or charred wood, they seduce with their raw simplicity, between utilitarian and decorative. The blackened hue, meanwhile, is obtained using an old-fashioned recipe – white vinegar and macerated iron wool. It’s an atypical 10-year journey that has led Benjamin Fély to come to terms with wood. After a cabinetmaker’s CAP and studies at the School of Decorative Arts in Limoges, he built up a solid multi-faceted experience at the CNEAI (Center National Edition Art Image), alternately manager, artistic director, space designer. Then, his meeting with the ceramicist Ambre Hervo, who shares his life, is decisive. Both founded the POK workshop in 2017, which offers better visibility to their successful creations of wood and porcelain lighting. If the craft techniques of cabinet making are the vectors of Benjamin Fély’s creations, he refines them during his trips to China and Sweden to meet other experienced craftsmen. Manipulating the gouge, (concave chisel) or the straight chisel, with dexterity, he favors the essences of the fruit trees, “Because they are softer and more malleable, and you can let the traces of engraved tools express themselves,” he explains. After a preliminary drawing, he cuts, sculpts, then letting himself be guided by the knots and the roughness of the material.