Settler's chair
(2015)

• Jon GOULDER (designer and maker)

Designer and maker Jon Goulder’s Settler’s chair draws inspiration from the ingenuity of European settlers in Tasmania in the early 1800s, whose resourceful use of local materials led to furniture that was a departure from the Victorian-era goods imported from England at the time. Emerging from investigation into such furniture, Goulder developed an original process for water forming, laminating and vacuum pressing large pieces of cow leather. Requiring no inner shell, this process delivered the self-supporting form for the leather seat in his Settler’s chair, and the design marks a change in the designer’s typical style, closer to mid-century modernism.