Expanding the Isomi product portfolio of desks, tables, walls, seating and storage, the new Join furniture family comprises a desk and table designed by Isomi’s co-founder and design director Paul Crofts. Like all Isomi products, the Join pieces can be customised in various sizes, heights and finishes to suit different environments – from grand corporate lobbies and hotel reception areas to small offices and boutique retail spaces.
With its natural veining and luxury connotations, stone introduces a premium quality to the Isomi material palette. Both stone and wood deliver additional notes of texture, natural pattern and nuanced colour that bring an added richness to the range and expand its potential environments to include luxury hospitality settings.
The Join Desk
The new modular desk is recognisably Isomi in aesthetic: free-flowing in form, sinuously curved, and unmistakably contemporary in style. Working with a slab-based natural material such as marble, however, is a significant departure for Isomi, and creating such fluid contours from such a rigid, inflexible material is a highly complex engineering challenge.
Initially, the plan had been to end with a faceted form that referenced the vertical cuts in the mountain quarries where the marble had been excavated, but by aligning the grain and machining the edges to a smooth curve, the Isomi team realised they could create the illusion of an unbroken flowing form within each module.
Clean-lined shadow gaps between each element emphasise the desk’s modularity – a key characteristic of Isomi furniture – which facilitates transportation and installation, and allows the desk to be configured to suit the individual requirements of the client.
In the wooden iteration of the Join desk, solid battens in oak, ash or walnut are arranged vertically, concealing module joints and creating a seamless appearance. Subtle shadows created by the chamfered edge to the profiled battens add visual depth, highlighting and celebrating the natural variations of the oak, ash and walnut.
‘The inherent qualities of the marble and the natural veining introduce a newfound warmth, texture and colour to our core material palette. As is always the case with Isomi, it was imperative that we use authentic materials with minimal intervention or surface treatment – and the desk and table both demonstrate this materially honest approach. Our designs celebrate an ancient material in a contemporary form.’
– Paul Crofts, design director, Isomi