There’s a creative tension that animates the work of Anna Jewsbury, founder and artistic director of Completedworks in London. It centers on the push and pull between “ornament and practicality,” as she puts it, exploring a balance of function and frivolity. What often results are pieces, loaded with character, that make you look twice — if not again and again — trying to figure them out. Completedworks began in 2013, with jewelry, before delving into ceramics and homewares. But most recently, Jewsbury decided to branch out even furniture, launching the brand’s first-ever collection at Villa Borsani with Alcova in Milan earlier this month.

The furniture collection explores what Jewsbury calls “the deception of materials.” A patinated, solid bronze chair and footstool with a stone-effect finish contrasts with their delicate look of draped, folded, and knotted fabric; a silver nitrate–finished console, coffee table, and stool are stacked, angular, and take up space, but they also have a lightness about them — layer cakes in furniture form. In some ways, these pieces are a continuation of what Completedworks has often done with jewelry, shaping hard, durable metals into elegant, fluid works of art. Pliable forms seem frozen for a moment, silver and gold appear crumpled or scrunched, and candy-colored resins become ruffled. It’s also how they’ve approached ceramics and homeware, evident in collection names like Squeezed, Inflated, Folded, and Bumped. The pillowy plumpness of the Stuffed candlesticks and mug or the Puffy jug belies the reality that they’re clay. The brand’s Thaw series of glassworks, made from broken windows and glass bottles, beautifully and playfully repurposed, combines the crystalline quality of the material with a just-right gloopiness and sag. We recently spoke with Jewsbury to learn more about the visual language of Completedworks, the brands’ evolution from intimate objects to large-scale pieces, and the unlikely link between philosophy and jewelry-making.

I’d love to start by asking about the new furniture collection: What are the inspirations behind it? I can see a through-line from some of the jewelry and homeware items.

There are definitely themes that we always come back to, and it was really fun to see what they might look like as much larger objects or furniture pieces. I love jewelry, and that’s still at the core of what we do, but it’s always at such a small and intimate scale. It’s been exciting to have the opportunity to work on bigger pieces.

I guess the inspirations here are the same as our general Completedworks inspirations, which come from anywhere. It might be something small and unnoticed that I walk past in the street. Or it might be the way fabric is folded in a Renaissance painting. Inspiration comes from lots of different places, often accidental or unexpected. And what I love about what happens when it becomes a piece — whether jewelry or homeware or furniture — I love the feeling that it’s captured something in a moment. For example, the bronze chair, if you look at it up close, you can really see the fabric and the folds and the puffiness of the original model. We’ve also done a mug and a ring in that way. I love that it’s kind of almost trying to deceive you, in the sense that you don’t know what you’re looking at and how it might feel when you touch it. It’s so satisfying looking at something that should be very soft or supple but when you touch it, it’s a hard metal or a hard ceramic form.

I love those shifts that play with your perception.

Exactly. When we were showing at Alcova in Milan people were kind of confused, which was really nice. They weren’t expecting the bronze chair to be so heavy. It looks really light and airy.

And the silvery pieces, how are those constructed, materially?

They are completely hand-built and made from clay and old bits of polystyrene that we’d accumulated, so very much kind of upcycled. The silvery colored ones have a silver nitrate coating, and we’ve also done some with a rubber coating which is quite nice because you can do lots of different colors — endless possibilities with the rubber ones. Which is how it’s intended really, because the polystyrene pieces will be made one at a time, made to order.

What was your process and approach like with these pieces? Where did you start?

With the bronze pieces, the process started with fabric and draping and folding it into shapes, as a kind of exploration. Then when it came to the actual modeling, we also did that in fabric. Then it was molded and cast in bronze. Actually a really similar process to how some of our ceramics are made, and some of our jewelry. But on a completely different scale. And it was a completely new foundry that we were working with. They mainly make sculptures for artists, so they’re really detailed with what they do.

Is furniture something you’ve been wanting to do for a while? Why was this the moment for it?

It’s definitely something we’ve been thinking about for a long time. I renovated a house in 2020, and I had all this polystyrene left over from that renovation and I turned some of it into some sculptures and I really enjoyed that process. They’re in my living room, they’re just for me. But I really enjoyed that larger scale and I love — and as a studio we love — exploring an idea across different products. Which is why we’ve never stuck just to jewelry, I think. We do objects, handbags, and now furniture. And I think it’s really fun, when you’re exploring a theme, to see where it might go with something new. So, it felt like a very natural progression. And our aim is always to be building a visual language. At some point it hopefully felt mature enough to really explore in different ways and different scales and different materials.

I think the other interesting thing for us is a lot of our work is this juxtaposition of femininity and function, or maybe like ornament and practicality. I think furniture has a really nice place in that mix, because at the end of the day it needs to be this functional and inherently useful large object. But it was exciting to play with that, to have an opportunity to explore furniture in the middle of that somehow.

I was wondering if the furniture, or your desire to expand in that direction, was influenced at all by the Completedworks showroom that Hollie Bowden designed?

Yeah, I think working with Hollie on the showroom helped us start thinking more expansively about the way our objects live in space. It was the first time we really had this opportunity to have an interior manifestation of the brand. She has such a beautiful way of combining materials and textures that it really made us think about our ceramics and glassware not just as objects but as parts of a larger environment. It inevitably got the ball rolling in our minds, a path that led to the furniture.

Talking about how objects live in space, I’m curious to get your thoughts about the body in relation to objects. The move from designing objects that adorn the body into designing objects that our bodies have a different spatial relationship with. Was this something that came up when you were designing?

Definitely. When you’re designing jewelry, you want it to be a beautiful object that can sit on your table, but the most important thing is how it looks on the body. It has this intimate relationship with you, it’s moving with you, and it’s worn close, which is really special and probably what drew me to jewelry in the beginning. With the furniture, we did have to think more about spatial relationships. It’s more architectural. But what they both share is this expressiveness of a person’s taste. And I think we try to make sure that the design language really follows through even though the pieces were going be used in such a different way. We want everything to follow through quite well.

Even in a lot of the jewelry pieces, there’s a volume and a depth to them, but there’s also a delicateness and you can see that in the furniture.

Thank you, that’s so nice to hear. Yeah, I think that’s true and when we’re thinking about jewelry there’s always this feeling of wanting it look quite sculptural. You’re doing in the constraints of the jewelry piece. If you’re going large you can’t be too heavy. And then whether we made a plan to or not, the furniture does have this decorativeness to it. It’s quite detailed. Even the big console has, if you look close up, it has all these tiny flowers embedded in it or tiny bows in it. And the same with the bronze pieces, you can see the detail of the fabric that it was molded from. That’s definitely something that’s common to our design language.

And I know sustainability matters to Completedworks. You often use recycled materials. How important is that in your furniture work, both materially and in terms of process? 

It’s something we’re constantly thinking about as a studio and trying to improve on. The polystyrene pieces were all made from waste polystyrene and then the bronze pieces are made from recycled bronze, which can be recycled. But it was also about trying to design pieces that hopefully feel like they could be timeless, and not following any kind of trends or feeling disposable.

The sense that these pieces could be passed along. In the way that fine jewelry is.

Definitely, and all the stories that attach to the piece through that process.

I’d love to know a bit about your background. How did you get started with jewelry?

So, I studied math and philosophy. I didn’t go down a typical design school route. People always think it’s a weird combination, but for me I think there’s this mix of the math and philosophy — they’re a way to try to understand the world, which is what always interested me and what was interesting to me when starting a brand.

Did you always have an interest in design? 

If I look back to my childhood, I was always making things. I made jewelry, as do many children. And my mom is from the Philippines and her family had a furniture business. So, when I was growing up, the house was full of interior design and fashion magazines. You can’t help but be influenced by those formative surroundings. So – much to be grateful for, to my mom.

What were the ideas that you wanted to translate from math and philosophy into a physical form?

There’s probably nothing left from what I was studying that I’m exploring now, but it was more this idea of creating a visual language through objects. What we do now is very much an expression of things that we’ve read or things we’ve seen, even if someone else might look at the object and not really get that connection. But when you’re designing, you can’t help but reference those things you fill your days with. In terms of the common themes, at the moment, even from our older collections, one of the themes we come back to a lot is this deception in materials. I don’t know if I can relate that back to math and philosophy.

I think there’s something philosophical about that.

Okay, good. [Laughs] I love this idea of trying to hold on to some sort of logic but having moments where you really let it go and you’re much more free. I love that tension.

Yeah, and it to be able to work with that tension in a physical way, not just a cerebral or intellectual way.

Totally. A physical object is something I’ve always appreciated.