Designersblock Milan 2010 takes place at the same beautiful location used in 2009, featuring over 50 exhibitors from The UK, Canada, Croatia, France, Germany, Greece, Italy, Japan, Korea, Latvia, Netherlands, Norway, Serbia,Sweden, and Taiwan.

For its Bodging Milano project, a team of design stalwarts including Gareth Neal and Matthew Hilton spent a week in the British countryside and went back to basics to create a greenwood chair in the great outdoors.

Revel Scalo d’Isola
Via Thaon De Revel,3
(Zona Isola)

From 30th March to April 5th, 10 designers went back to the furniture, living for a week in the woods of deepest Herefordshire.

With the help of Gudrun Leitz and her assistant Paul, each will make a greenwood chair in Gudrun’s outdoor workshop. We are all getting out of the studio, away from drawing boards, computer screens, and mechanised equipment into the hands-on world of the original country chair-makers working without electricity with pole lathes, steam benders and hand tools.

The designers are, Amos Marchant, Carl Clerkin, Chris Eckersley, Dave Green, Gareth Neal, Gitta Gschwendtner, Matthew Hilton, Rory Dodd, Suzanne Barnes, William Warren.

Bodging Milano came about when Designer and Artist Chris Eckersley was asked to design a chair for Dave Green’s furniture company Sitting Firm. The resulting chairs called ‘Arden’ were a variation of the English Windsor Chair.

The Arden project led to an interest in traditional chair making and production so when Chris came across Gudruns chairmaking courses on the internet he thought he should go bodging himself to see what it was like. He sent some pictures from the weeks course to Rory Dodd at Designersblock who said wouldn’t it be great to do something like that and present it at the most important furniture fair in the world, the Salone del Mobile in Milano and Bodging Milano was born.

Gudrun agreed to begin her programme of courses a week early, Chris told his furniture friends and before we knew it we had a group of the UKs finest designers ready to bodge in Clisset’s Wood, Bosbury, Herefordshire.