Whipping Up a New Recipe for Furniture: A Conversation With Samuel Ross

Dr. Samuel Ross doesn’t fit in a box, even though a lot of what he designs does. At just 32, the creative has worked with Apple, Nike, and luxury group LVMH. Earlier this year, his ongoing collaboration with Swiss watchmaker Hublot and the release of his uniquely styled Big Bang Tourbillon timepiece stole headlines where the fashion and art worlds collide. Later this year, with his studio, SR_A, the British designer will debut a collaboration with bathroom giant Kohler, further demonstrating his agility and fearlessness across industries.

Trained as a graphic designer, Ross honed those traits under prolific creative Virgil Abloh, the late menswear director at Louis Vuitton and founder of luxury streetwear label Off-White. Ross established his own high-end brand, A-Cold-Wall*, in 2014, debuting with tees, hoodies, and high tops with messaging that spoke to the economic disparities he experienced firsthand growing up in inner-city London. His work often has something to say, whether it’s clothing, a visual campaign, an interior installation, or the brand new furniture collection he debuted earlier this month.

Ross’s fourth line, now on view at New York’s Friedman Benda gallery, comprises six sculptural one-off designs that combine a striking post-industrial bent with West African traditions. While earlier furniture pieces explored the past 300 years of personal and collective trauma of the Black experience, the new series, called Coarse, reflects the designer’s renewed optimism, touching on themes of generosity, community, and tenderness. We spoke with Ross to learn how an object as common as a stool can be both a place to sit and a work of art.

Dwell: Tell us about your latest collection. What does it represent for your creative evolution?

Ross: Lately, I’ve been considering my contribution to the field in terms of what furniture and design can offer beyond form and usability. For this latest collection, I’ve been thinking about how alchemy allows material to have a new life. I wanted to see if I could integrate uncommon components that represent bodily nourishment such as milk with the synthetic textures and surfaces of industrial materials like plywood and OSB. I’m figuring out how to build a new language through materiality and the memory it can carry.

Your work is often framed around questions of how we deal with history, representational imbalances, nature, decay, and emotional response. How is your furniture more than just furniture?

It’s about being conscious of the times we live in. We’re always moving between different architectural and design movements and there’s some absurdity to that. We appreciate the organic nature of certain materials as much as we do the uniformity of certain shapes. If you look at the ANAESTHESIA I desk, you see cast concrete but there are recesses and reliefs that break with the standardized application the material is normally used for. In addition, the surface has been treated with burned milk and honey which draws back to the past and incorporates a West African perspective.

Produced with fired wenge wood I sourced in Nigeria, the BORDER table holistically evokes the complex reality of extracting material from a former British colony and bringing it back to the U.K. to be processed. The design’s form also expresses the different literal and conceptual levels of the African diasporic experience. The use of firing throughout the collection refers to the notion of embalming the body as a type of self-fortification and preservation, an unexpected way to express exuberance and celebration. The SLAB bench plays on the utopian ideas of brutalist architecture and open access—the playgrounds one can find in a housing development of that style. For many, these structures serve as a first encounter with public art.