Pennyfields chair designer, Alex Whitney, commented…

“ I am really ecstatic that my chair [Pennyfields] was chosen for the ‘Metamorphosis’ award because it has allowed me to uncover the true potential of the design. It only started as a side project to explore the possibilities of using bamboo and steel, and to make a low-volume production chair which compliments Pli’s current range of bamboo and steel tables. Now, with the extra funding and support, doors are opened up for us and the development process has been put into overdrive.”

The Pennyfields chair will embody the sustainable nature of bamboo. The first 10 chairs are currently being pressed, formed, welded, sanded and finished by skilled hands across the UK. The raw bamboo is produced in China to the highest international quality standards by Pli’s long-standing supply partner. Once it reaches UK docks all the production is carried out by British manufacturers based around the South of England. This combination of cultures is also reflected in the name ‘Pennyfields’; a street in Limehouse which was the first ‘China-town’ in London, after Chinese sailors settled in the area in the the 19th century.

Matthew Lewis said the following about the chair…

“Alex Whitney’s chair design was chosen for Metropolitan Works’ Metamorphosis New Product Development project as it was already at advanced concept stage, and offered significant business potential for Pli Design Ltd. Developing a chair design is a major undertaking, but we had confidence in Alex and Pli who have experience developing and manufacturing furniture products. As part of London Metropolitan University, Metropolitan Works are very pleased to be able to offer Alex this opportunity to develop, prototype and showcase his design at the UK’s most prestigious design event.”

The Metamorphsis award winners were selected in July 2010. Since then, Pli and Metropolitan Works have been working together to finalise the design and develop the first production-ready chairs. During this development process Pli have taken advantage of Metropolitan Works’ digital manufacturing facilities, which are the most advanced non-commercial facilities in the UK. This enabled the project to move seamlessly between virtual designs and physical models which dramatically reduces the time needed to develop a product.

The Pennyfields chair will be launched at the beginning of the London Design festival, on the 20th September, along with the seven other Metamorphosis award winners on the terrace of The Dock. As well as the Metropolitan Works exhibit, there will be stands by some of London’s top design names and retailers. Tom Dixon, Moooi and mydeco.com are all showing their latest products during the week-long show.

Notes for editors

Pli’s furniture is available through distributors and retailers throughout the UK including Liberty and twentytwentyone. All Pli’s furniture is made in the UK to exacting quality standards and sustainable design principles. For more information contact Christopher Pett or Alex Whitney on 020 8670 6857 or office@plidesign.co.uk.

Pli Design Ltd, Unit D 015, 62 Tritton Road, London SE21 8DE, UK
Tel. +44 20 8670 6857. Email office@plidesign.co.uk. Web www.plidesign.co.uk

CAFOD’s facilities manager Quentin Padgett said,

“Our staff and volunteers love the tables and chairs supplied by Pli. They fit well in our naturally ventilated and low energy office building. The use of recycled and recyclable material fits well with our aim to reduce our impact on the environment. The building has been designed to reduce running costs and to have a robust quality, and the furniture supplied by Pli reflects this.”

Whitechapel bamboo tables and Reee recycled chairs at CAFOD

The ‘Reee’ chairs, made in the UK from recycled electronics equipment (100% PlayStation games console casings) stack ten chairs high so they can be stored or moved efficiently. The Whitechapel tables seat four diners and are made from laminated strips of solid bamboo which means they are both extremely robust and naturally sustainable. Their bamboo-and-steel frames are designed for quick disassembly and refurbishing when required.

Tables and chairs on the mezzanine floors

“We were thrilled to supply our furniture to CAFOD: not only is their cause good but their new building is really impressive, both environmentally and aesthetically. We have noticed that so-called “third sector” organisations are leading the way in procurement for new sustainable architectural projects and we have supplied our furniture to charities like the RSPB and the Eden Project as well as to CAFOD. This means sustainable contract furniture can find a home in any project, since the third sector has much tighter budgets than profit-making organisations but they know how to procure designs that reflect their own principles.”

Pli’s furniture is available through distributors and retailers throughout the UK. All Pli’s furniture is made in the UK to exacting quality standards and sustainable design principles. For more information contact Christopher Pett or Alex Whitney on 020 8670 6857 or office@plidesign.co.uk.

Black Architecture won the Grand Designs Award 2010 for their Deckhouse project and achieved the coveted ‘Excellent BREEAM rating for the CAFOD building. They can be contacted on 020 7021 0068 or contact@black-architecture.com

Whitechapel occasional tables at Liberty

The tables offer rounded corners and hidden joints to create a quietly elegant design that is also strong, sturdy and, above all, useful. The solid bamboo panels are naturally stain resistant and very hard wearing. The laser-cut pressed steel legs are powder-coated in either cream or black-olive colour-ways.

The Whitechapel tables can be bought at Liberty on Great Marlborough Street in London’s West End from June 2010.

The Whitechapel dining tables combine super-strong solid bamboo panels with laser-cut steel legs and supporting bamboo beams. Pli’s Director, Christopher Pett, explains, “The principle of this design is to use bamboo for its unique properties, not simply as a replacement for wood. As well as being a fast-growing, natural material, bamboo also has strength and hardness that most varieties of timber can’t match. It’s naturally stain resistant and it has a beautiful, distinctive grain. These features make bamboo a perfect material to use in contemporary homes for casual kitchen and dining tables.”

4-seater kitchen table

Pli’s design manager, Alex Whitney, adds, “We wanted to create a range of furniture that is effortlessly sustainable, from the sourcing of the raw materials to the local manufacturing and the ease of disassembly for regular refurbishing. All the parts can be replaced or refurbished with very little effort. We use a common leg across the whole series so our customers can buy a bigger table top if they need one, without needing to replace the steel legs. They can even have the leg colour changed regularly if that’s what they want.”

Pli at Grand Designs Live 2010

The Whitechapel dining table range starts with a 4-seater table, 90 x 90 cm square, for kitchens, lounge dining and restaurants. The ‘slim’ dining table, 160 cm x 80 cm, seats 6 and is aimed at diners in houses and flats where space is at a premium. The full-size dining table seats 8 comfortably, with a 201 x 90 cm top. Pli has produced a custom 10-seater table with a 240 x 90 cm top in response to a customer request at Grand Designs Live, and this has now entered the range as the largest dining table that Pli can make from a single bamboo panel.

Custom 10-seater dining table

In three pieces and at an impressive 3.7 metre length, the 12-seater Whitechapel boardroom table is the largest table that Pli produces. It’s designed for contemporary, eco-friendly offices and features a very large cable-management tray in the centre. the boardroom table is designed to come apart to form two separate desks.

Whitechapel boardroom table

The Whitechapel dining table range can come packaged with Reee chairs, made from 100% recycled computer games consoles. Pli can even match the leg colours of the tables and chairs to meet our customers’ needs. The Reee chairs are comfortable, easy to keep clean and refurbish and they stack for space-saving storage.

Bamboo dining table top

The Whitechapel dining tables are available in a variety of laminated solid bamboo panel configurations. All the dining tables are supplied with at least 3 layers of bamboo forming the top panel, to make it stable and strong for the lifetime of the product. Customers can select different colours and grains to match their interior, with the ‘caramel’ colour proving by far the most popular so far.

Laser-cut steel legs support the solid bamboo frame

The Whitechapel dining tables are available for contract customers directly from Pli and domestic customers can see the tables at Places and Spaces in Clapham or by appointment at Pli’s workshop. Pli will hold a warehouse sale of the prototype Whitechapel tables we have produced in the lead-up to the launch of our new range. The sale will run throughout the last 2 weeks in June, from 21 June to 2 July.

The exhibition runs from 24 to 27 September at Earl’s Court in London.

Pli is showing the Mark 2 design of the Reee chair, with a 14% carbon footprint reduction and a stronger frame that securely stacks 10 chairs high. The Mark 1 Reee chair launched at Sony PlayStation’s London HQ in September 2008 and can already be seen in use at many new eco-friendly buildings around the country.

The Reee chair is made out of 100% recycled plastic from games consoles, wrapped around a tubular steel frame. The Reee chair is an example of home-grown sustainable design: developed and manufactured in the UK from locally sourced recycled materials.

The Reee chair will also feature in the Geffrye Museum’s “Eco Home” exhibition from October 2009 to February 2010. The Geffrye Museum in London explores the home in Britain from 1600 to the present day.

The Wrap and Whitechapel table series exemplify a different approach to sustainable design. In place of high-quality recycled plastic, Pli has chosen natural raw materials like FSC certified Ash timber and bamboo combined with pressed steel. The result is a range of sleek, strong tables that can be cared for and treasured for years.

Taken together, this range represents Pli’s uncompromisingly eco-friendly product development philosophy matched with their commitment to affordable, appealing designs. View the full collection at stand H34, 100% Design 2009.

Note for editors:

Please use our contact form to direct your media enquiries (click here).

The top and legs are available to purchase separately and the Wrap top has been designed to accept other bases.

British-made chair, using 100% recycled PlayStation®2 consoles, to be launched in London on 10 September.

London, 1 September 2008, London-based Pli Design Ltd (www.plidesign.co.uk) will be launching its latest eco-friendly product, a chair made from 100% recycled games consoles, on Wednesday 10 September at Sony Computer Entertainment Europe’s head office in London.

The British manufactured ‘Reee® chair’ has a plastic seat and back made entirely from recycled PlayStation®2 computer games consoles*. With 100% of the plastic coming from a single source of recycled consumer products, the chair is the first of its kind in the country.

Each chair uses 2.4 kg of recycled plastic and the chair parts are designed to be recycled again and again. Unlike most recycled plastics, which are usually made from a variety of recycled sources, the plastic in the chair is 100% computer games console. The chair is also completely sourced and manufactured in the UK.

In an era of increasingly expensive raw materials and growing concerns about the carbon footprints of new products, the chair is a breath of fresh air. Recycled plastic requires a fraction of the energy to produce, compared with ‘virgin’ plastic that comes straight from the oil barrel. UK-sourced materials and manufacturing means the chair travels a fraction of the distance from factory to customer, compared to a chair made in Asia.

All these factors are important for buyers who are putting environmental responsibility and sustainability on their list of ‘must haves’ when choosing new furniture. Alex Whitney, Pli’s Design Manager, said, “The simple idea behind the Reee® chair is to produce a recycled furniture product in the UK that has style, function and durability but does not compromise its environmental credentials — so our customers don’t have to compromise theirs.”

The Reee chair was conceived at the Eden Project in Cornwall where Pli’s staff were discussing the possibilities for reusing high-quality plastic from waste electronics products with other manufacturers, including Sony Computer Entertainment, at the annual Eden Project suppliers conference. The idea to produce a quality chair for contract, education and domestic markets was born and Pli brought in Sprout Design, a specialist sustainable design consultancy, to develop the concept into a finished product. With funding from London Remade, the London Development Agency’s waste and recycling initiative, Pli developed the original prototype into a production-ready model and the Reee chair went into full-scale production in July.

Pli’s Director, Christopher Pett, commented “The Reee® chair does not put a premium on the cost of sustainable living: it is priced competitively with other domestic and contract seating designs in the UK market. Pli’s mission is to prove that sustainable businesses in the UK can compete on price and quality with imported products.”

The Reee® chair will go on sale at the Eden Project’s visitor shop in Cornwall and through selected retailers and contract suppliers across the country in September. The Reee® chair will also be available to buy at Selfridges on London’s Oxford Street for the duration of the London Design Festival, in the Designersblock pop-up shop located on the 4th floor from Wednesday 10 September to Tuesday 23 September.

Reee Chair Launch, 10 September 2008

Notes for editors

The European Communities WEEE Directive

The games consoles are collected and reprocessed under the EC Waste, Electrical and Electronic Equipment (WEEE) Directive. The WEEE Directive entered into force in the UK on 2 January 2007 with full producer responsibility from 1 July 2007. It requires electronics manufacturers to take responsibility for the recycling of their products at end-of-life. The plastic seat and back parts of the Reee® chair are made from 100% recycled plastic derived from a single source of WEEE products.

The Reee Chair launch

Design and interiors journalists who want to attend the launch of the Reee® chair at Sony Computer Entertainment Europe, 10 Great Marlborough Street, London W1F 7LP on Wednesday 10 September from 6.30 to 9 pm should contact Pli on 020 8670 6857 or email office@plidesign.co.uk

About Pli

Pli designs and manufactures contemporary furniture. Pli’s workshop is in London, UK. Established in 2003, Pli’s aim is to supply high quality and environmentally sustainable furniture to homes, offices and public buildings. Pli develops new, exciting designs and sources the best environmentally sustainable materials available.

“PlayStation” is a registered trademark of Sony Computer Entertainment Inc. All rights reserved.

“Reee” is a registered trademark of Sprout Design Ltd and Pli Design Ltd. All rights reserved.

Pli Design Ltd
Unit D15, 62 Tritton Road, London SE21 8DE
tel +44 (0)20 8670 6857
christopher@plidesign.co.uk
www.plidesign.co.uk
Contact: Christopher Pett

Facebook guest list: http://www.new.facebook.com/event.php?eid=39130427912

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