Never Break the Chain
The Transition necklace by Hall Haus (image: Fabian Frinzel).
For French design collective Hall Haus, it’s not a case of simply producing one design, then throwing everything out and starting on the next. Instead, each piece links together, iterating and reworking like links in a chain.
Despite being a relatively young studio – it was founded in 2020 by Abdoulaye Niang, Sammy Bernoussi, Teddy Sanches and Zakari Boukhari, two of whom are still finishing their studies – Hall Haus’s main themes of multicultural collaboration, street style, and a melding of high and low culture are evident across its rapidly expanding oeuvre. Shapes and motifs created for one piece often recur later in another guise. The Transition necklace and bracelet, for example, did not start out as jewellery, but as a chair.
One of Hall Haus’s first pieces, the Curry Mango chair, grew out of a 2020 artist’s residency at Lafayettes Anticipations in Paris. As part of their mission to make traditional design more approachable, the collective based the Curry Mango on a ubiquitous folding camping chair from outdoors brand Quechua, remixing it by way of Marcel Breuer’s steel and leather Wassily chair. Designed in 1925, and itself inspired by the frame of a bicycle, the Wassily chair can retail today for more than £3,500. As such, Hall Haus’s adaptation in turmeric-yellow leather and wood, filtered through a £14.99 picnic chair, offers a cheeky take on design history.
Curry Mango proved too tricky to put into mass production, but the studio has re-used elements of the chair, such as the distinctive junction of its feet caused by the angle of its crossed legs, in other designs. “I tried to make a vase in this shape,” says Bernoussi. “Then I thought it would look very beautiful in jewellery, so I made it as jewellery.”
Bernoussi wanted to 3D-print jewellery moulds for lost-wax casting in the shape of the chair’s feet for each chain link, so he turned to the internet where he found bespoke jewellery makers MDCT, led by Alex Hans from his workshop in China. “I met him on Instagram,” shrugs Bernoussi. “He’s the only guy I could find who can do this. I tried to make it in France and no-one could.”
Hans usually makes custom engagement rings using conflict-free stones, but he applied his 20 years of jewellery-making experience to weld the delicate chain links together. Hall Haus emailed over its digital models, which were 3D-printed in wax and cast in silver, before being finished by hand. “All the 3D-printing was done in China,” explains Bernoussi. “It’s much cheaper there and it’s better than sending things back and forth.”
Bernoussi is keen to stress that this international collaboration demonstrates the top flight craftsmanship designers can find in China, despite an attitude of general snobbery that has crept in towards design manufactured there. “People sometimes criticise things that are made in China, but they forget that the Chinese invented ceramics, paper and firearms,” he says. Hall Haus has no time for snootiness when it could instead be building a chain of collaboration that stretches around the globe.
Words India Block
Photographs Fabian Frinzel
This article was originally published in Disegno #35. To buy the issue, or subscribe to the journal, please visit the online shop.