Pepe Heykoop’s delightfully quirky office chair would be right at home in a Tim Burton movie. It has the shape of a standard-issue desk chair, but it’s missing an arm and is upholstered in a collection of leather scraps that have been Frankensteined together. If the resulting silhouette is more eek! than chic, that’s the point.
The humble office chair, instantly recognizable for its ubiquity rather than its aesthetic value, is a symbol of mass-produced, often cheaply made furniture that eventually ends up in landfills. “We live in a world where clothes and furniture and many more things are consumed like fast food,” the Dutch designer tells The Study. “Many of the products we have nowadays are hard to repair and of poor quality.”
Heykoop’s displeasure with furniture’s disposability has led him to scour the streets for broken and abandoned items, seeking to salvage and repair what he can. “As I was reconstructing found furniture frames from the street, it felt like redoing the skeleton,” Heykoop says. “It needed a skin afterwards.” To create one, he started collecting leather scraps — and was shocked by how much material is wasted in manufacturing items like leather sofas and bags. He pieced and glued these together and used them to cover his rebuilt pieces. The result was the Skin Collection, which Heykoop launched in 2011.
“We are living in a time where the production of objects has exceeded the practical need for them, and many designers are mining waste streams and ready-made forms as raw material for new designs,” says Jude Hughes, a contemporary-design specialist at 1stDibs. “The fact that Heykoop is directly addressing these concepts with an object that is somewhere between silly or repulsive and adorably imperfect conceals the seriousness of the concepts he is addressing with a disarming humor.”
This particular piece, which Heykoop offers on 1stDibs, evolved from a desk chair he found with a broken arm. He took it back to his studio to repair it but decided he liked it as it was and covered it in a patchwork of leather offcuts. “Just a quirky chair with one armrest it became,” he says.
The impetus behind the Skin Collection was to transform found objects, so each of the items in it is one of a kind. Among them are a large standing mirrror, a floor lamp and a light made from a children’s ride-on toy that could absolutely inspire a character in an animated film. Heykoop also does custom commissions and completed one for an artist friend, who made him a portrait in exchange for a rocking chair covered in earthy shades of red.
Heykoop wants his Skin Collection to inspire people. Although he has saved furniture and leather offcuts from ending up in a landfill, more needs to be done, by all of us. “Let’s be honest … we consume too much, and therefore we throw away too much,” he says, adding, “We should become aware of our deeds and their consequences. Because as a buyer, you have the influence.”
