The Playful Logic of Soft Baroque (Original)
Shaped by a decade of collaborations with talented designers, Hem’s evolving design language reflects a wide range of perspectives. In this series, we highlight one collaborator each month, exploring their inspirations, creative approach, and what Hem represents to them.
Article and interview by Timothy Small.
Founded in London by Nicholas Gardner and Saša Stucin, Soft Baroque is a creative duo that operates at the intersection of design, art, and architecture. Their work resists easy categorization: furniture becomes a vehicle for experimentation, objects are thought of as art pieces, and familiar forms are often pushed into truly unexpected, surprising territory. Their projects are defined by a distinctive mix of a certain conceptual rigor mixed with a large amount of playful irreverence, and the works of the duo, who both graduated from the Royal College of Art in London, have been exhibited at the Victoria & Albert Museum in London, the Etage Projects Gallery in Copenhagen, and many others. In a phone conversation with Nicholas Gardner, we spoke about Soft Baroque’s approach to design, the subtle role of humor in their work, and the challenge of creating objects that sit between an experimental studio practice and the logics of large-scale industrial production
Timothy: When you started, were you interested in entering the world of product design, of, let’s say, making objects for everyday use, or were you approaching things more as a studio practice?
Nicholas: I wanted to create designs that, in some way, questioned the world we were living in while still functioning as consumer objects. That naturally led us toward one-offs and artworks as part of a studio practice, a kind of maker’s approach. For us, HEM became a bridge into the world of production, something I had always fantasized about. From a somewhat selfish perspective, that’s what HEM represents for us. It was also an opportunity to explore how design could exist in a changing landscape. In the 2000s, many established brands were closing, including some of the smaller Italian producers. At the same time, a new wave of furniture manufacturing was emerging, with companies like HEM. We were interested in how design could operate in a world increasingly divided between extremely cheap, mass-produced products and very high-end pieces. People were becoming more nomadic and less inclined to buy large amounts of furniture for their homes. In that context, finding a middle ground becomes difficult. You can go very high-end, or very cheap and high-volume, but occupying that middle plane, where objects are high quality yet still accessible, is much harder.
Timothy: HEM has always been a very playful brand—like a match made in heaven with your work.
Nicholas: Playfulness is a big part of our work. One of the ways we cope with the complexity of the world today is through humor. The challenge is finding the balance between something that risks being a gimmick and something that has real beauty and long-term value. Usually that means distilling playfulness into something more subtle—maybe a shift in proportions or an unexpected combination of materials. The goal is to create something that can endure. With HEM, we’ve always felt there’s room for different degrees of experimentation. Historically, some brands have been much more radical, much louder in their material choices or conceptual statements. But there’s space for all of it: quieter ideas that reveal themselves slowly, and others that are more immediate and bold
Tim Small: One thing I wanted to ask you about is HEM’s positioning—the idea of bridging design, art, and architecture—which also seems very present in your practice. Where did you find the easiest points of connection between your approach and HEM’s? And where were the more challenging ones?
Nicholas: Communication was actually very easy. Our initial idea for the table was quite simple. The drawing itself didn’t take long. We made some cardboard templates and worked through the form fairly quickly. But then the project enters a completely different phase on their side, which is how to actually produce it. That’s a complex design challenge in itself: finishes, production processes, tooling, the factories involved.
Timothy: That part can feel a bit like a black box
Nicholas: Yeah. We don’t necessarily know which factories we’re working with or exactly how they prefer to manufacture things. In many ways, the best designs are the ones where everything aligns, where the idea works naturally with the manufacturing process. Ideally the object has fewer parts, a clear logic, and a certain efficiency in how it’s made. As a designer you can have an intuition for that, but ultimately you don’t always know how a factory will approach things or what their preferred methods are. I think from that perspective, it would be nice to, in an ideal world, have this seamless back and forth where you could design an object that would be somewhat integrated with the manufacturing, so that it was very well finished, but also easy for them to produce and environmentally friendly and all of these factors that are necessary for it to be on paper, a good design. And also has some cultural value or has some aesthetic value that rings true with people, so it’s not just a dead piece of furniture in the showroom.
Timothy: It seems to be quite similar to the approach that you would have if you were producing an art piece, in that you have a design, you draw it, and then there’s a production, which is complicated in it’s own right, but then it’s almost out of your hands. And then it’s just, you have to make sure that it reflects the original spirit of the piece.
Nicholas: Oh yeah, for sure our part is basically, yeah, it’s just coming up with an idea. And I mean from our perspective, we think about our own production, because we produced a lot of our pieces in the workshop. So a lot of the pieces that we conceive are based around how producible they are for us, you know what I mean?
Timothy: Are we talking about different scales though, or not really?
Nicholas: Yeah, totally, totally.
Timothy: When you work for a brand like HEM, besides the industrial scale, does their, let’s say, positioning? Their ethos, even, does it influence your work in terms of, let’s say, when the work becomes more of a conversation with the brand?
Nicholas: I’d say it’s definitely a conversation. We’ve never really worked with a brand where the process was completely carte blanche. There’s always been an understanding that it’s a collaborative process, that we work through things together. For me, that comes quite naturally because of my background in product design. I’m used to the idea that a design will need adjustments and modifications in order to become a successful, releasable product. A mass-produced object has to meet a lot of criteria, it needs to be feasible to manufacture, and it has to appeal to a certain number of people. That’s something I tend to keep in mind from the beginning. Saša approaches things a little differently. She has more of an artist’s mindset: this is the idea, take it or leave it. In our pr
ocess, once the initial concept is established, I usually take over the more technical side, developing the drawings and working out how the idea can actually be realized. For us, it’s still a bit of an experiment. We’ve produced three or four larger pieces so far, and the experiences have been both successful and, at times, a little frustrating. So we’re still figuring out how much we want to continue in that direction.
Timothy: Okay, last question. It’s a bit theoretical, maybe even a little silly, but also a serious one. Try answering it as if you were explaining it to an eight-year-old: in what way can design change people’s lives, at the most basic level?
Nicholas: I’m not sure it can be summarized so simply, but I think objects encourage us to behave in certain ways. I often use the example of an uncomfortable chair. Sometimes an uncomfortable chair is actually a good thing, because it creates a moment where you stand up and move around. Objects can subtly shape our behavior. At home, for example, we didn’t always have a sofa. When we finally got one, it changed the dynamic of the household. Suddenly there was a place where everyone gathered and stayed longer. So even something simple like that can influence how people spend time together. On a functional level, design can change the way we behave. Sometimes that change might even feel a bit uncomfortable, but it can push you into a different rhythm or way of interacting with your environment. For me, it’s interesting to experiment with how objects can shift those behaviors. But there’s also another layer, which is storytelling. We tell stories in almost every part of our lives, and objects can carry stories as well. One of the things modernism perhaps lost a little is this idea that objects can communicate narratives or emotions. And I think that’s a real shame.
