The home of architecture and design in Asia-Pacific

Get the latest design news direct to your inbox!

Defining quality design and drawing on artisanal expertise with King

With design at its heart, King is finding ways to merge traditional knowledge and experience with future technological trends. In this video, we meet Manolo Bossi and the in-house design team in Sydney to find out how they work.

If furniture-makers King were to be described with one word, it would be quality. It’s the core tenet that ties everything else together, from past experience to adaptability in the face of future change.

In the figure of design consultant Manolo Bossi, who has spent recent years outside Italy to explore the process of modern furniture making, King has a crucial ingredient for achieving quality design. It is, in a word, expertise.

With an artisanal heritage reaching back to Italy, Bossi brings expert craftsmanship as part of a unique role of design stewardship. His aim, starting with a connection to objects and materials, is to share knowledge and act as a mentor to the design team.

Mina Bassilious, senior designer, explains further: “Every day Manolo is telling us about the way he’s designed products in the past and the things he’s learned that are applicable to what we’re doing now.”

The knowledge required to design and make quality furniture takes time, stretching back generations even. Handing down this knowledge ensures that the next generation at King are inspired to carry on the same work as custodians of specialised knowledge.

This work, however, moves with the times and King is fully aware the need to be adaptable. “The machine nowadays becomes very helpful for those who try to translate old methods of making things into a mechanical way but with good quality,” says Bossi.

King is working with a reliable formula: innovation built on strong foundations of artisanal knowledge, the embrace of new technologies and a design philosophy anchored in quality.

Find more information on King here at kingliving.com.au.

INDESIGN is on instagram

Follow @indesignlive


The Indesign Collection

A searchable and comprehensive guide for specifying leading products and their suppliers