Heirloom Debuts New Stools at Alcova
Villa Bagatti Valsecchi, Stand A4
Created from reclaimed ocean plastic in collaboration with The New Raw - Design team at Heirloom includes Jan Rose, Creative Director at TOOGOOD and Ben Moore, formerly of Marc Newson Ltd
April 10 (Milan, Italy) – Physical-digital design studio Heirloom will be debuting their novel 3D-printed stool concept at Alcova’s Villa Bagatti Valsecchi (Stand A4) for this year’s Milan Design Week. Designed by Heirloom team members Jan Rose, Ben Moore, and Jack Godfrey Wood, the Flump Stools originated from a material investigation into 3D printing reclaimed ocean plastic in partnership with The New Raw in Eindhoven.
The stools are called Flump after their friendly, relaxed posture: a ‘Flump’ is both a combination of sitting and falling and a British marshmallow candy. The original clay maquette emerged out of a squashed cylinder, creating the signature kink and seat tilt which in return creates a ledge for your feet and a gentle, jovial attitude. Walking around each stool offers different views of Flump’s multifaceted character, from leaning, squatting, chubby to cheeky.
An exercise in pushing the bounds of materiality and sustainability, each stool is 3D printed by an automotive robot using a single filament of molten recycled resin that starts at the base and finishes in the center of the handle. The design of the stool is optimized to utilize post-consumer material in the best way possible and embrace the odd ‘off-shade pastel’ colors. In the future, the design of the squashed cylinder will be carried through a family of products. Future play within materials will include hollow sand casting aluminum, hand applied plaster and CNC machining from a block of cork.
“We make it a priority to experiment with what it means to create future heirlooms. Working with The New Raw offered a lovely opportunity to explore how production will need to change over the next 100 years and how we can find joyful, engaging ways to showcase post-consumer material.” noted Jack Godfrey Wood, one of Heirloom’s co-founders. “We’re so excited to bring our Flump Stools to Alcova, which we’ve long admired for its irreverence, ingenuity, and joy as a platform. Flump is the first product we are debuting as a studio, and it perfectly encapsulates two of our key values – first, prioritizing materials that have past and future value; second, it has a joyous irreverence that makes us smile,”
The stools originated through playful experimentation as Heirloom looked for more versatile, irreverent and joyful seating for its new studio space. They were designed in concert with The New Raw, a research and design studio that has developed an in-house robotic manufacturing process to transform plastic waste into beautiful and meaningful products that are 100% circular.
The robot arms of The New Raw’s technology use a single extrusion of recycled plastic to create uniquely nuanced textures that inspired the design, and as new iterations could be printed instantly, the development was an iterative and circular process in which any prototype was simply remelted and printed again.
Panos Sakkas of The New Raw noted, “We truly enjoy projects that embrace and highlight our manufacturing techniques and digital craftsmanship developments. After intense study and prototyping, we arrived at the method by which the fluffy layers build up, which is in most harmony with the geometry of Flump”
The Heirloom team that created Flump was led by two pioneering designers – Jan Rose, Creative Director of TOOGOOD and Ben Moore, formerly of Marc Newson – and draws from a wide range of experience designing for MillerKnoll, LVMH, Google, and Samsung, with a keen sense of furniture design ergonomics, sustainability in manufacturing, and excellence in aesthetics and craftsmanship.
Currently available in 4 colors and 2 sizes, Heirloom are also creating new versions in Aluminum, cork and stainless steel. The Flump Stool is available for custom orders.
About Heirloom
Heirloom is a studio of celebrated designers united by a belief that the key to developing transformative medical, consumer, and digital products is ingenious design driven by experience, empathy, and joy. The name Heirloom is an embodiment of this mission: that every new product should be created with ‘heirloom-quality’, delivering engaging, inspiring design of uncommon, enduring quality.
First founded in 2022 by Jack Godfrey Wood, Harc Lee, Tate Sager, and Andy Furner, the boutique consultancy brings together a team of multidisciplinary designers and former leadership of some of the world's most notable studios including Pentagram, fuseproject, Toogood, Marc Newson, and Fantasy. From consumer technology to medical devices to workplace furniture, and digital futures, Heirloom’s work redefines the boundaries of the possible and expected, delivering bold, joyfully human experiences in areas where humanity is most vital. Recognized by clients and contemporaries for their ingenuity, thoughtfulness, and poise, Heirloom’s practice spans multiple markets, including healthcare design, where their work prioritizes patient-advocacy, dignity, and error-reduction, within tight cost constraints; audio design and consumer technology, where they are practiced in evolving iconic expressions of new technologies that unlock new audiences; workplace and lifestyle design, where they have designed and built sustainable visions for better living, working, and playing; and digital futures, building elevational interfaces for breakthrough digital experiences.
While Heirloom’s current major work is in development, its twelve founding designers have collaborated with everyone from LVMH, Illumina and Knoll, to Google, Aston Martin, and more. Collectively, they have received more than 150 awards including honors from IDSA Best in Show, Cannes Lions Gold, D&AD, Red Dot Best of the Best, iF Gold, and MDEA Gold.
About The New Raw
The New Raw is a research and design studio based in Rotterdam (Netherlands) founded in 2015 by architects Panos Sakkas and Foteini Setaki with the ambition to give new life to discarded materials through design, robots and craftsmanship.
The New Raw develops its own (digital) craftsmanship techniques through a formal and technical language that highlights the texture and the layer-by-layer character of its in-house robotic manufacturing process. The exploration of the possibilities that the robotic techniques provide transform plastic waste into beautiful and meaningful products that are 100% circular.
Media contact
Sara Griffin // +1-917-656-6348 // sara@griffinprny.com