A new collection of office furniture stole the show at Design Miami/Basel 2019 last week. Editors and attendees swarmed the booth of British-Canadian designer Philippe Malouin, whose ‘Industrial Office’ collection of simple shapes and cheery colours posed a stark contrast to the high gloss luxury that often characterises the fair.

The showing took the form of blocky — and colour-blocked — workday accoutrements. Billed as ‘an in-depth study on office furniture, and fabricated using a variety of industrial materials and techniques,’ Malouin devised a collection that included a desk, chairs, lamps, phones, consoles, rugs, shelves and coat hangers in nylon, Polytek Polyurethane casting rubber and textured Polyurethane coated steel.

Very much an exercise in experimentation, Malouin’s simplified forms expressed the aesthetic potential of these industrial materials. Pieces like the ‘Rubber Chair’, composed of a monolithic block of rubber, was formed by casting plastic in moulds typically used for shaping concrete: the stepped form exposing varying levels of transparency depending on thickness. Meanwhile, processes inspired by the construction of Japanese chainmail were used to create ‘Metal Rug’, a series of interlocked coloured galvanised steel rings forming a geometric pattern.

Nylon, though, was the material most utilised throughout the collection. The ‘Executive Desk’, ‘Sideboard’, and ‘Swivel Armchair’ are all composed of the material, which is otherwise used to create objects ranging from seatbelts to spatulas. Indeed, even the bearings that allow the chair to swivel smoothly are made out of spherical balls of the synthetic material.

Combining forms that draw from the visual canon of office design with a focus on material research places the collection far ahead of the curve, meaning Philippe Malouin’s new collection feels like the most creative interpretation of the corner office in recent memory.