Fidget Exercise
The Kyora Board by Studiomama for Cotto (image: courtesy of Cotto).
The wood squirms beneath your feet, rocking back and forth, shifting laterally with each movement of the hips. Your core tenses up, and different muscle groups fire and twitch in the legs, tipping the balance as the sapele wood fidgets and rocks in resistance.
The Kyora Board is a curve of milled wood. Seen from above, the board is vaguely easel-shaped, but beneath this its flat surface bows and curves round to form a wooden rocker, atop which it balances precariously. When weight is added – a foot steps onto it, perhaps – the board’s balance is thrown off kilter, and its new load needs to continuously adjust its positioning to maintain a tenuous equilibrium – a surprisingly addictive form of exercise. It is, then, a piece of gym equipment, albeit a particularly beautiful piece of gym equipment. Except, this may not be the correct nomenclature. “It's an exercise board, but it's not,” explains Nina Tolstrup, who together with her partner Jack Mama designed the Kyora through their east London practice Studiomama. “We haven't used the term ‘gym equipment’ around it, as such. It’s leaning more towards the aesthetic of the wood and its domestic qualities.”
Image: courtesy of Cotto.
The Kyora is the debut product of Cotto, a new design brand founded by Owen Zeal. Cotto’s aim, Zeal explains, is “to create sculptural gym equipment that would be a total departure from all those currently on the market.” No plastic, no metal – only materials that would “be kind to the planet,” Zeal clarifies. The aim of the Kyora, then, is to create a functional piece of exercise equipment whose aesthetic owes more to the home than to the aesthetics of the gym. “It's trying to find a marriage between two things,” Mama explains. “This is a product, but it's also got this sculptural element to it.” When not in use, the Kyora can be hung on the wall using a specially designed mount – from here, its functionality becomes undetectable, and it shifts in emphasis towards the artistic or decorative.
The connections between these two aspects of the Kyora are, as Tolstrup suggests, linguistically tricky, but their formal execution is harmonious. The board’s dimensions are beautiful, but also “perfectly ergonomic”, Zeal notes. “The width is shoulder-width to allow you to do a press up on it,” he says, “and then the shorter length is perfect for a plank.” The hole in the centre of the board (where the wood it at its thickest) allows it to hang from its mount, but it is also surrounded by a series of milled concentric ripples – a design motif suggestive of agitated movement, but also, Mama notes, a functional cue “that’s indicative of where you put your feet.” The asymmetrical form of the board, meanwhile, is what grants Kyora its sculptural properties, but also means that it is easier to climb onto than a conventional, circular board because of the manner in which it can rest on its edge as you mount. “There’s kind of a lip,” Tolstrup explains, “so it's very comfortable to come up slowly and get your balance on it.”
Image: courtesy of Cotto.
In this respect, Kyora ably balances its different dimensions. The carved wood is elegant and sculptural, but the board in use is giddy and silly – a suitably addictive game of trying to maintain poise and balance as the board wriggles beneath you. It embodies what Zeal terms a form of “fidget exercise”: a fun, quasi-gamified form of physical exertion that can be returned to throughout the day at the user’s leisure, as opposed to “the tyranny of pressure that comes with an hour's workout after work”. This effort to cut through some of the stigmas and pain points of exercise is present within the design’s aesthetic too. Mama and Tolstrup were already thinking about the design of home exercise equipment when contacted by Zeal because, “like everyone else,” Tolstrup explains, “we have all these [pieces of equipment] standing in the corner of rooms as eyesores.” The pair admired the effectiveness of such equipment (Tolstrup notes that their’s son’s pull-up bar is something that “I use every morning”, even if it’s “hideous”), but felt there was scope for design to more fully integrate these pieces of equipment into a domestic setting. “We liked the idea that they could just be part of your interior and not things that you have to hide away,” Tolstrup explains. “At present,” Mama adds, “a lot of that equipment actually doesn't fit at all in the home.”
Image: courtesy of Cotto.
Studiomama’s introduction of both a more sculptural mode of expression and solid wood as part of the material palette of home exercise equipment has had a knock on effect. The pricing of Kyora is tipped away from the mainstream home gym market (where boards typically range from £20 up to a few hundred pounds) and more towards the art or craft market that is suggested by its form. The sapele version of the Kyora costs £1,950, a sycamore edition is £1,650, and, as such, Cotto is targeting specifying architects and specialist retailers as opposed to more conventional consumers. Yet Studiomama note that the project has been made possible by increasing levels of access to the machinery required to produce the Kyora’s complex, distinctive shape. Each board is milled in a workshop in east London, which is “only possible today,” Tolstrup observes, “because even a mid-sized carpentry workshop will now have a five-axis milling machine.” Use of five-axis milling technology reduces the need for more traditional handcraft – and thereby lowers costs – “which is opening up a whole new way of creating objects like this in wood,” Tolstrup adds. “Of course, these machines have been around before, but they've only been in a few workshops and it has been quite expensive. The accessibility is now much greater, which means that although they’re still not cheap, they're commercially possible."
The Kyora Board is intended as a statement of intent for Cotto, which plans to launch further designs in future. It is a piece that shifts between two different worlds, and which aims to occupy a space that stands poised between the two. “When you look at the briefs that people have for gyms, whether it's in hotels, or private residences, it's almost as if they’re an afterthought,” says Zeal. “They’ll make the space look nice, but then just fill it with equipment – there’s no sense of letting the equipment be a part of that space.” With Kyora, Zeal and Studiomama hope to reverse the trend – an exercise board that is not an exercise board, but which does, at least, belong.
Words Oli Stratford