The Making of Min
Max Lamb’s Min Chair distils his fascination with making, material and construction into a deceptively simple form, shaped by little more than a few cuts and the logic of the material.
Written by Laura Houseley for Hem in collaboration with The New Era magazine
Video by William Williamson Images by Heiko Prigge
Architectural, fundamental and primitive, the Min Chair is a bold pine design by Max Lamb for Hem. Defined by its repeated diagonal angle and distinctive silhouette, it rethinks the idea of a standard chair. The design is an exercise in material efficiency. Developed as a self build product, the chair is constructed from a minimal number of cuts. The result is a chair with strong character made from remarkably little material.
“I like the idea that a physical object can tell the story of its own making. It means I don’t have to speak; I can just make more,” says designer and maker Max Lamb. We visit his London studio as he works on his Min chair for Hem.
Max Lamb is demonstrating how to cut a length of wood for the camera. He talks through each stage thoroughly and thoughtfully, stopping regularly to make sure the photographer and I are keeping up. As Max goes through the motions of making the Min Chair, his new product for Hem, he allows his inner monologue to become audible: confident, relaxed and meticulous.
Max makes the Min Chair in his studio, a corrugated aluminium-clad building on the edge of his property in Harrow, London. Designed in collaboration with Matheson Whiteley Architects, it is stacked with tools and materials: bales of freshly dyed wool hanging from the rafters, polystyrene forms in various stages of assemblage piled to one side, lengths of bamboo leaning against a wall, tools suspended neatly above workbenches. Outside the workshop is a corridor of floor-to-ceiling cabinetry, a large hand-painted table that doubles as desk and lunch station, and a tiny but joyous bathroom clad in Max’s curvaceous Tajimi Working Tile.
At the opposite end of the garden, like a contrary architectural book end, sits his home: a lovingly restored 1884 Mission Hall originally built for a local church. Ornate red brick and decorative wrought iron hint at the exultant interior beyond.
The hall itself — intended by Max and his wife Gemma as a living space but currently functioning, perhaps inevitably, as a gallery — feels like the bow of a vast ship, with weathered floorboards and a cavernous ceiling. In places, the careful restoration gives way to contemporary additions: a monolithic kitchen block, sculptural radiators designed by Max himself. The two buildings differ entirely in style, materiality and function, yet both are products of the same dedication, attention and ambition. The same could be said of Max’s work over the past two decades: a catalogue remarkable for the breadth of its materials and production methods, yet somehow still entirely coherent — unmistakably, satisfyingly his own.
As we sit down to talk, now without the comfort of his making props, Max issues the caveat I’ve heard before: “I don’t like doing interviews. I don’t like talking about my work.” Many designers say the same, but Max truly means it.
Max articulates through making. He leaves it all in the object. When the time comes to discuss his work, he often feels it is unnecessary — everything has already been said in three dimensions.
From a critic’s perspective, the readability of Max’s work is one of its most compelling qualities. His objects allow the user to trace the decisions behind their construction, following the contortions of his thinking through form, material and assembly. This is difficult to achieve in design. If object-making is an exchange of ideas between maker and user, Max is unusually generous in what he reveals: ”I want each piece to tell its own story. I want that story to be legible. I like the idea that a physical object can tell the story of its own making, and the logic and process applied to its creation. It means I don’t have to speak; I can just make more.”
The work Max is currently engaged in is the latest evolution of a long-running series called Economy Chairs. It began in 2020 as a lockdown project in which he set himself a manufacturing challenge: to make as many chairs as possible in the shortest amount of time, relying only on his own labour.
In this sense, the Economy Chair is typically Max Lamb: selfinitiated, solitary and physically demanding — a test of endurance, production and problem-solving. The final form, however essential it may appear, is almost secondary to the mental and physical act of making itself.
"When I begin making, I don´t know what the actual physical thing is going to be. I don´t really have a visualization of it. Or sometimes I do, but it won't be what I end up with. My fingers do what my brain is asking. The process might begin with a vision, but it doesn´t begin with a design."
The vision for the first Economy Chair began with polystyrene, a material Max has used throughout his career. To make it go further, he cut and joined lengths diagonally, discovering that by carefully placing acute angles he could maximise the surface area and transform a relatively small amount of material into something far greater than the sum of its parts.
The first Economy Chair project saw Max make sixty chairs in three days. But the technique was too compelling to abandon there, and he continued to evolve the series across different scales — Premium Economy Chair, for example — and materials.
When fashion house Bottega Veneta asked Max to produce 421 chairs for its Spring 2026 Milan runway show within just four weeks — “a commission only a madman would accept,” as Max puts it, before adding, “I said yes” — it was the Economy Chair he returned to.
Perhaps it was inevitable that the efficiency of the chair’s construction, combined with its growing status as a signature Max Lamb design, would eventually lead to a mass-produced version. After seeing a pine iteration in Max’s workshop, Hem founder Petrus Palmér invited Max to adapt the chair for factory production. The resulting pine chair, Min — as in minimum — follows the same principles as its predecessors, with subtle adjustments to scale and construction. It is the sixth variation of the Economy Chair, and the first to be available outside private commissions. Max’s approach to making, whether for gallery works or mass production, remains unchanged.
“My decision-making doesn’t change depending on whether an object is a production piece or a one-off piece. Even the Min Chair — something ultimately designed for a company to take on — I felt I had to prototype myself, just to get the scales and proportions right. There is only so much information you can gain from a sketch. There is no substitute for direct physical contact. My work requires a certain sensitivity, so I am constantly in the workshop trying to understand scale and proportion.”
Max is not blind to the contradictions of his own position. His practice is built on the mythology of authorship: his exertion, skill and judgment sit at the centre of every project. From pivotal works such as Man Rock Drill — which saw Max grappling with tonnes of stone, the final forms limited by what he could physically manoeuvre and carve — to deeply personal projects like My Grandfather’s Tree, where a felled tree from his grandfather’s garden was meticulously dissected into individual seats.
But success, and the growing demands that accompany it, inevitably require expansion — a studio, collaborators, a team. It is a point of friction for him: ”When it comes to my work, my world, I like to do my own thing. That’s how I built my practice. I was one man. But I only have one pair of hands and multiple projects, so I end up managing people, managing a team. That means less enjoyment, less satisfaction. I feel removed from the work.”
The image of Max Lamb as the solitary maker — testing himself against material, landscape or technique — has become central to the mythology surrounding him and, in many ways, to an entire generation of independent designers. Others may wish to replicate his success, but the formula is difficult to define, let alone imitate. It is not simply about material choice; Max has worked across everything from textiles and bamboo to tiles, stone, wood and, most recently, cardboard in the BOX series. Nor is it about technique. The spectrum of making Max employs is, again, vast: welding to carving, casting to tufting, high-tech to low-tech, craft to industry. Max reduces his methods to a simple distinction: “I’m either taking material away or adding it.”
"I've got loads of experience making chairs now. From the top of my head, I know what works. Designing lots of chairs has made me a better designer: more efficient in conception, in development, the evolution of an idea into a product, in design-making."
What he does could not really be described as conceptual. In fact, his approach is driven by instinct and intuition — almost the antithesis of concept.
“Every material has its own logic, its own character. You have to stop trying to force an outcome. Let the material lead.”
What follows is less a predetermined design process than an acute reading of the possibilities inherent within a material, system or constraint. Whether standing in front of a block of stone or an industrial production line, Max instinctively assesses the limitations, opportunities and efficiencies available to him before arriving at his own understanding of what is possible. It is notable, too, that Max’s work is never nostalgic.
His Exercises in Seating exhibitions have become something of a cult classic. The first was held in 2006 at the Royal College of Art, and the fourth instalment concluded in October 2025 with forty chairs on display. Across the series, Max gathers together chairs made over many years, allowing their similarities and differences to emerge collectively. The exhibitions demonstrate both his continual reinvention and his enduring fascination with the typology.
“I’ve got loads of experience making chairs now. Off the top of my head, I know what works. Designing lots of chairs has made me a better designer — more efficient in conception, development, and in evolving an idea into a product, in design making.” I ask Max if that means he is satisfied. “No. I’m still looking for balance in my work. I like the newness of the next project.”
So much of Max’s making happens in the wild — sand-casting on beaches, carving polystyrene in the back of a van, working stone in floodlit quarries — that it is unsurprising to find him feeling slightly restrained by the structure of the workshop.
“A project can last anywhere from four weeks to twelve months. All that effort — creativity, design, communication, production, photography, delivery — begins and ends with that commission. Then I want to move on.”
Max seems most comfortable in perpetual motion. The physical act of making itself — the labour, the exercise of it — remains central to the appeal of his work.
Before we finish, he briefly mentions a number of new projects already underway: another collaboration with Acne Studios, new work in Japan, further commissions are already in production. But before the conversation can settle on specifics, he is pulled back into the workshop for a final round of photographs before the light disappears. And so the perpetual motion of the practice begins again.
