SABEL Saddlery was thrilled to be invited by sculptor / engineer Peter Linnett
to collaborate on the fabrication of Dragon – a corsetted chaise longue.
Designed, led and overseen by Peter, Dragon is the result of his efforts combined
with those of a longbow maker, corsetmaker, upholsterer and saddler.
After considering a range of possible solutions with Peter, we chose to use a
combination of leather straps and leather thonging to fix the upholstered seating
pads to the underlying support frame. As the supporting frame for the cantilevered
"tail" was made from three English Longbow staves (that work in both tension and compression against one another) the fixing method needed to be secure, have some degree of flexibility and retain the integrity of the bows.
The longbows were arranged such that they tapered towards the tip so, as the seating pads diminish in size and the bows converged towards the end, the space for strapping and lashing them became increasingly limited and thus more challenging. To finish off the tip, prior to covering, we lashed the three staves together before covering them with a hand stitched cone of flexible leather.
This was a fantastic project to work on and we're delighted that Dragon was successfully debuted at Design Shanghai – we're sure you'll agree the finished piece is pretty spectacular. It was a real pleasure working with Peter Linnett on this, our first project together, and we hope we can look forward to more exciting collaborations.
