Furniture for people who like surprises – from BRC designs

A tweet from @decorex2011 alerted us to the wonderfully strange BRC Designs, a furniture studio based in Spartanburg, South Carolina under the leadership of the distinctly idiosyncratic Benjamin Rollins Caldwell – a man who is apparently enthusiastic about being photographed covered in Styrofoam. Want to see the picture? You are going to have to wait. We are going to make you look at his furniture first. This is from the Impracticable Comfortable Collection and contains 282 miniatures of Southern Comfort. Whatever next eh? Tables full of crumpled up dollar bills?

Yes, 787 crumbled up dollar bills are stuffed inside this clear acrylic table. We Suggest that this would not be an ideal purchase for someone with teenagers who are always a few dollars short.

Now this is cool. Protrusion Low Table features sixty four  pyramids of various heights and colors. The glass is held in place by the ones which poke through it. Cunning or what? Probably makes it a hard place to rest a board game but a strangely fascinating piece of furniture. And who plays board games anymore  anyway?

Otherwise known as ’0111010001100001011000100110110001100101-01′ Binary low Table is every geeks dream furniture. Inspired, and indeed made from a pile of old computers that were sitting in a nearby warehouse.  And all those numbers? That’s binary code for ‘Table -01′ we are told. If you knew that, just don’t tell anyone.

It is, perhaps, a little troubling that we chose to bring you a close up of the furniture made from old computers and not the money or whisky. But tell us if there isn’t something fascinating about all those textures and colors. And we are, after all, a high tech business. Not that we aren’t fond of whisky and the occasional dollar bill as well.

BRC furniture is so fascinating that you may have forgotten that photo we promised you of him. Did we say styrofoam? Or was it packing peanuts, or money maybe? The chair, by the way, is his Spider Chair, there is also a table, sofa and more.  The cushion is made out of recycled zippers and silk ties. At this point we often launch into a little homily about the value of innovation and experimentation in design and how without it we would never develop the ideas that feed the traditional end of the market. But enough of that. Here’s Benjamin.

And yes, he is immersed in Styrofoam. And if you head over to his flikr stream you can see him immersed in all sorts of other materials, as any good designer should be, including money. There is also more of his surprising furniture. We say good luck to him and BRC Designs.