CategoriesDesign Concepts and Techniques
Whimsical Design
Playful furniture and objects that use humour, fantasy, animal forms and visual puns to delight as well as serve.
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About
Humour in design is older than modernism. Eighteenth-century decorators painted monkeys dressed as courtiers across French panelling. Surrealism made the joke pointed: Meret Oppenheim set a small table on bird's legs in 1939. After the war Claude and François-Xavier Lalanne made a flock of woolly sheep that serve as seats, and the San Francisco designer John Dickinson cast plaster tables that stand on animal feet.
Pop and Postmodernism opened the door wider. Eero Aarnio's Pony (1973) is a seat shaped like a toy horse, Alessandro Mendini treated furniture as a painted joke, and Garry Knox Bennett drove a bent nail into a finely made cabinet in 1979 to mock precious craft. Contemporary makers such as Jonathan Trayte and Ashley Hicks continue in sculptural, colourful directions. Look for exaggerated scale, bodies and animals, borrowed forms and unexpected materials; the best whimsical pieces are still well made.