Color in furniture design

There is a reasonable argument that furniture should have no color at all. Or rather, that it should disappear — become neutral, recede behind the life being lived around it. A bookshelf, in this view, is a backdrop. What matters is the books.

This argument has merit, and most furniture design has accepted it. The predominance of white, grey, natural timber, and black in domestic interiors is not accidental. These are colors that don't insist. They wait.

But I think the argument depends on an assumption worth examining: that furniture is something you look at rather than something you use.

Consider the spectrum. At one end, an industrial pallet rack. It has one job — hold things — and color is irrelevant, except where it signals danger. At the other end, a computer. You touch it every day. It lives in your foreground. Color is part of what you are interacting with. The same is true of a good pair of sneakers, a phone, a bicycle. Objects with high daily interaction invite color because color is part of the experience of using them.

A shelf that holds a monitor, becomes a desk surface, lives alongside a record collection or a row of books whose spines you look at every morning — that object is doing something different from storing things you look at twice a year. It needs to look right with your stereo equipment, with the colors of your books, with the room it inhabits. Treating it as a neutral backdrop is a choice, and not necessarily the right one.

I think about Hella Jongerius in this context, whose work at Vitra and elsewhere has argued — more rigorously than I can — that industrial color has historically been timid. That defaulting to neutrals is a kind of consensus-seeking that serves no one particularly well. Her color work is a sustained argument for conviction over caution. I find it persuasive, though I am still working out what it means in practice for what we make.

Massimo Vignelli would have disagreed, or at least complicated the point. His palette was famously restricted — a small number of colors, used with absolute discipline. His argument was not against color but against careless color. Color chosen without conviction is, in his view, worse than no color. That also seems right to me, which leaves me holding two correct and somewhat contradictory positions, which is perhaps where most honest thinking about color ends up.

Richard Sapper's Tizio lamp is black. Not neutral — emphatic. The color is a statement about what the object is: precise, industrial, undecorated. Konstantin Grcic works in a similar register, though with more willingness to introduce color when the object and the context invite it. Both of them treat color as a material decision rather than a surface one. That distinction seems important, even if I couldn't fully defend it in an argument.

Paul Smith is perhaps an unlikely reference in this company, but I think he belongs here. He has built an entire body of work around color confidence — the conviction that an audience exists for objects with genuine chromatic commitment, across categories from fashion to furniture to collaboration with manufacturers who might not otherwise have gone there. He is, in a sense, the market proof of the argument.

Powder coating makes this practical for us in a way it hasn't always been. The color range is broad, the finish is durable, and bright saturated colors — the kind that would have looked cheap on laminate — look considered on steel. The material suits the ambition, or at least we think it does.

We are still working out exactly what that means for Desh—. But it seems worth working out.