Marque Furniture has launched a sister company Marque Sussex, to promote sustainable furniture with designs by Simon Pengelly, Bed Fowler and John Weaver.
‘Our mission for Marque Sussex is to deliver exquisite pieces of furniture that embrace our core values of honest craftsmanship and use of sustainable, ethical materials. We reject mass consumerism and keep it local as much as we can. We’re allowing ourselves the freedom to design and create elegant furniture cherished for its quality of material, beauty in detail and loved for years to come,’ says Fowler.
‘Everyone at Marque Sussex is acutely aware of the need to limit our footprint. We believe in the need to move towards “slow furniture”. We use sustainable, traceable, often local timber, chosen by eye and crafted with care. Pieces are designed and made from our factory building nestled at the foot of the South Downs in Newhaven, East Sussex. And we plant new trees for each item of furniture we make.’
Its first design is the Orb bedstead and side cabinets designed by Weaver, in which the ash timber used for the first batch of Orb beds comes from a near-century old tree grown in a woodland near Chichester. ‘Sawn and dried, it was sold to a merchant in Petworth where I selected the wood by eye, for the beauty of its grain. The wide, long boards required for the beds create a great opportunity to show off the diverse character of our native English ash often presenting unique panoramic landscapes. The boards travelled through the Sussex countryside to the workshop in Newhaven, a total of 69 miles, not the tens of thousands involved when American timber is shipped to China for production and back again for distribution in the North American or European markets,’ he says.
Other initial designs are the Manx stools and tables in British alder and Leap desk by Fowler. These will be followed by Pengelly’s Scapa rocking chair.
