Unto This Last is a furniture studio and workshop, based on two sites in London. Its name comes from the title of a book by John Ruskin, published in 1862, in which he advocated a return to localised, craftsman/artisan workshops as an antidote to the conditions which industrialisation had imposed on much of Britain’s working class. As a fore-runner of William Morris and the Arts and Crafts Movement, Ruskin’s thoughts were influential, but the rising standard of living which mass manufacturing brought to the West meant that his pleas were ultimately seen as anachronistic. But according to Olivier Geoffrey, founder of Unto This Last, CNC machining and on-demand manufacturing open up possibilities for the craftsman in the community which may yet see Ruskin’s vision realised.

D Chair © Unto This Last

For the last month or so I have been teaching on the MA Industrial Design course at Central St Martins in London, on a project titled “manufacturing and consumption futures”. The project  is intended to encourage students to research the opportunities which new production methods allow for more personalised products, to propose and refine a system of their own, and ultimately to prototype the system itself. I hope to show some of the outcomes in a later post, but as part of the research for the project students were invited to Unto This Last’s Brick Lane workshop, to look around and to quiz Olivier about his philosophy.

Facet Sideboard © Unto This Last

Olivier began by explaining how, if you’re engaged in design, you’re inevitably bound up in the distribution systems of the products you’re designing. A designer working at Ikea, for example, doesn’t design flat pack furniture just for the sake of it, or even because it’s part of the Ikea brand experience. Flat pack systems allow customers to transport their purchases home from the store and then assemble the furniture themselves, which is crucial for keeping costs down. Whereas a designer working for Cassina knows that the assembly and transportation costs will be tied up in the price the furniture, and can therefore rely on skilled craftsmen using specialised tools to build a piece of furniture, rather than an untrained consumer with an allen key.

Honeycomb Shelves © Unto This Last

Unto This Last’s designs are similarly a reflection and a result of distribution systems and logistics. A customer who visits the store can see some examples of the products on sale, but with the exception of a few small gift items, no products are held in stock, instead they are manufactured to order. This reduces the costs of storage and inventory, whilst also allowing the company to carry more than 2000 items its catalogue. Orders are made in-store and delivered pre-assembled, and because the furniture is shipped direct from the store it means packaging is also greatly reduced. In this way, by using digital manufacturing processes and some of the techniques recognisable from other mass customisation initiatives, Unto This Last can offer custom-made furniture at close to mass-production prices.

Nurbs Coffee Table © Unto This Last

Unto This Last uses laminated birch ply for all its products. Clearly the material has properties, both visual and functional, which many designers in the past have found interesting, and it would probably be naive to suggest that the only reason for using the material is its fit within Unto This Last’s distribution chain. Nonetheless, it is remarkably suitable for helping Olivier realise his vision. To begin with plywood is very dimensionally stable, and has uniform properties in all directions (unlike natural timbers, where grain and knots affect the strength and shape of the material). It also doesn’t shrink. This means that parts can be machined on a CNC router with a high degree of accuracy (typically Unto This Last manufacture to tolerances of 0.1mm); such precision also simplifies the process of assembling the finished furniture piece – less finishing is required, and glue dries under the natural pressure of the fit, without the need for clamping. Using laminates also allows Unto This Last to effectively design its own materials – both workshops (in Brick Lane and Battersea) have presses for applying ’standard’ veneers of oak, walnut, maple and a melamine coated surface, as well as allowing experimentation with bespoke surfaces such as fabric, leather and paper.

The CNC router used at Unto This Last’s Brick Lane workshop

The use of birch ply laminates undoubtedly plays a part in the consumer acceptance of this way of working – because the material is relatively uniform it means a customer can be confident that the piece of furniture delivered to them will be virtually identical to the one they saw on display. But the material also has a significant impact on the both the designs of Unto This Last’s furniture, and the process of design which leads to them. Parts are designed which anticipate the requirements of production, they incorporate tapers, chamfers, clearances etc which can be machined rather than relying on a furniture maker to create joints and fixtures by hand. Design elements which are proven to work on one product are reused in new products, and so a vocabulary, both technical and aesthetic, has built up. All of Unto This Last’s products are built in Solidworks, and by using equation driven parameters a design can easily be modified such that changing one dimension will cause all other critical dimensions to update. The company has also put a significant amount of effort into developing custom API’s to calculate the most efficient way of laying out parts before they are machined.

Pierre, a designer at Unto This Last, demonstrates a CAD model of a table

How the constituent parts of a fully assembled piece of furniture are machined turns out to be a significant issue for Unto This Last. Not only does it make sense to save costs by wasting as little of a laminated sheet as possible, businesses in London have to pay per kg of waste, which provides another incentive to make efficient use of each sheet. Typically the workshop will take two weeks worth of orders, computer software then creates a ‘cutting map’ for each sheet of laminate required. Where it’s not possible to use an area of the sheet for furniture that has been ordered, smaller gift items are incorporated into the cutting map to fill up the empty space. Again this demonstrates how Unto This Last are almost obsessive in the use of digital technologies to refine the manufacturing process; this is the key difference, Olivier explained, to more expensive furniture makers where a significant amount of cost is tied up in waste and poorly optimized logistics.

Tea-Light Candle Holders © Unto This Last

Certainly the concept of a craft workshop in the centre of a city, enabled by digital technologies, where customers can see and hear and smell custom furniture being made, seems to have struck a chord: 40% of customers come from the recommendations of past clients, and a further 40% are people who just happen to see the store and are interested enough to look in. But Unto This Last goes against the flow of most mass customisation enterprises, which tend to be impersonal and usually offer no contact with the designer, and where cost reductions are achieved by off-shoring to faceless factories rather than opening an atelier in the middle of London. Just how successful Unto This Last is at realising Ruskin’s vision remains to be seen, but we’d have more interesting cities, and more interested customers, if it showed the way for others to follow.

Thanks to Olivier and Pierre for their time, and Ben Hughes for arranging the visit.

Detail of Tapered Ply Table © Unto This Last