Surrounded by Design

Newly launched studio and workshop Surrounding Objects creates locally inspired furniture in collaboration with Indonesian artists, designers and craftspeople

Stephanie and David Getty, founders of Jakarta-based Studio Getty, launched their new venture Surrounding Objects at the 2020 Stockholm Furniture Fair’s Greenhouse platform. The design studio and workshop was born out of the Gettys’ desire to create useful and beautiful items in collaboration with designers, artists and craftspeople, and to use local resources in the hope of highlighting more common materials in order to ‘breathe new life into them and showcase them in a way that makes people see their potential’, as David describes. Surrounding Objects is also a reflection of the Gettys’ backgrounds; they met at the Rhode Island School of Design, where they obtained their master’s degrees in architecture, and after both working for architect David Salmela in Minnesota, they relocated to Jakarta in 2014 to oversee design and production at Stephanie’s father’s woodworking shop.

For Surrounding Objects’ inaugural collection, the two once again worked with Salmela, this time on the Lap bench series and the 10/3 table. Thanks to intelligent and efficient design, just one sheet of plywood is used to produce all three sizes of the Lap bench. The 10/3 table echoes the benches in its straight-lined construction as well as its practical production; it’s also cut from one single piece of plywood in order to minimise waste. In Stockholm, the benches were shown in both a light basswood, a common softwood found in Minnesota, as well as a dark plywood often used in Indonesia’s shipping industry. The choice of wood is a reflection of the duo’s heritage — Stephanie grew up in Indonesia and David in the northern United States, and they aim to showcase their home countries’ local and sustainable materials. Indeed, local crafts have informed much of their process. ‘We want to make things that are rooted in craft, but are modern and contemporary,’ says David.

In a distinct nod to Nordic design, the SL screen is constructed from panels of rattan — produced by Indonesian master weavers from BYO Living — that form an arch pattern and a stacked grid inspired by the wallpaper designs and brickwork of Swedish architect Sigurd Lewerentz. A smart system of knob- like dowels on the oak frame means the screen can be customised to fit any space. Following the Stockholm Furniture Fair, the prototype of the SL screen was installed within Lewerentz’s St Mark’s Church in Bjorkhagen, Sweden, the very setting that inspired its creation.

Surrounding Objects’ next project will be a collection titled Found Furniture, inspired by the simple joinery techniques and inventive solutions used by Indonesian labourers to fashion temporary seats and resting spots along the streets of Jakarta. A handful of these charming handmade pieces have inspired the duo to experiment with recreating them from new materials, and the resulting series — planned to debut in autumn 2020 — is intended to be a celebration of the ingenious, child-like nature of the original objects.

And as Studio Getty, the duo is also working on a shophouse in Bali, due to be completed at the end of 2020, that will become a living and working space, as well as a showroom for the Surrounding Objects collections. And on top of marrying the duo’s architecture practice with their new homeware project, says Stephanie, ‘We’re also hoping to open it as an artists’ residency, so designers can come here and access the resources that we have in Indonesia.’

Text / Katie Hagar