Meet Charlotte Kingsnorth, the Only Natural 2025 judge and furniture designer who playfully fuses sculpturalism with functionality.
Mossy mohair, wool, velvet and leather envelope pre-loved wooden furniture pieces in Kingsnorth’s signature hi!breed designs. Beautiful and strange, her pieces are a mutation of industrialism and fantasy.
These pulsing fabric forms give a sense of growth emerging organically from timber chairs. Charlotte herself has described how she uses ‘fleshy biomorphic upholstery’ to extract ‘the characters of these chairs’ and express the personalities she imagines for them.
Thoughtful details of her pieces include hand-cut buttons from tree branches salvaged from trees that have been felled near to her studio and puffy silk forms punctured with turned walnut studs, gentle reminders of precision within the fluid objects.
Kingsnorth does not feed into trend cycles. Instead, her pieces give reason to ‘keep an object around even after it has broken, highlighting the cracks and repairs as simply an event in the life of an object rather than allowing its service to end at the time of its damage or breakage’.
She embraces the subversive, avoiding mainstream, toxic methods of furniture production and giving old pieces a breath of new life. Her work embraces repair, transformation and the belief that an object’s life doesn’t end when it breaks, it evolves.
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A graduate of the Royal College of Art’s ‘Design Products’ programme, Charlotte currently runs her London-based practice. She has worked with clients, galleries and institutions, including Tyler The Creator, Bill Gates, A$AP Rocky, Christies, The V&A, NOMAD Design Fairs and Design Miami, New York, London, Paris and Milan.
