When Egg Collective launched their debut furniture collection at ICFF in 2012 — snagging a Best New Designer award in the process — they seemed to the design world to have come out of nowhere. And in fact, though the three — Stephanie Beamer, Crystal Ellis, and Hillary Petrie — met and began collaborating as 18-year-old freshmen at Washington University’s architecture school more than a decade ago, the truth is they had formally joined forces and had begun crafting an ICFF plan only six months earlier. “I remember the three of us sitting outside the Javits Center in our Budget truck, about to move in furniture that we’d been working on with no one having seen for six months,” says Beamer. “I was like, you guys, this is it. People could just walk by us the entire fair. But thankfully we seem to have struck a chord and the work resonated.”
That’s a bit of an understatement. In the two years since their debut, Egg has been showered with accolades — Forbes’s 30 Under 30 list, Martha Stewart’s American Made awards, and our own American Design Hot List, to name a few — and they’ve built a successful business despite the fact that their model — every piece made painstakingly by hand within the five boroughs — can be difficult to sustain from a retail perspective. They’ve slowly built up a client list of interior designers and interested individuals, for whom much of the work they do is custom. This year, they joined the New York showroom Colony and premiered their first licensed product, a mirror that appears to float in space (and was appropriately named after Ellis’s grandfather, an aeronautical engineer.)
It’s details like those that make Egg’s furniture so compelling. Every piece feels imbued with a personal history because of the care the three put into each aspect of its making, from the carefully chosen materials palette (lots of warm brass, bronze, and stone) to the fact that each piece is named after a friend or family member. When I visited their Navy Yard studio and asked if they each had a favorite piece, Petrie responded: “I think we feel too emotionally involved in each of these pieces to choose. When I look at a piece I know how many chipboard models were made, and how many long hours of discussion we had on it and the things that have changed with it. It’s hard to detach yourself from and really love a piece or really call it your favorite.”
We have a hard time choosing as well. Click through the slideshow at right for an introduction to Egg’s work as well as a better glimpse into their studio and process.
At Egg Collective’s Brooklyn studio, you’ll find not only a sampling of furniture from their own collection but also art pieces by friends and loved ones. This photograph, above Egg’s Francis Desk and Densen Dining Chair, is by Crystal’s sister, Chicago-based photographer Tealia Ellis-Ritter. “It’s been our goal since we started to offer artists the ability to show their work in an unconventional venue, and also it helps us,” says Hillary. “We’re trying to create a more well-rounded setting for our work instead of always photographing a simple product shot.”
Egg’s founders reflected in their Davies mirrors, from left to right: Stephanie Beamer, Hillary Petrie, and Crystal Ellis. The mirrors are gold-leaf on maple, hand-gilded upstairs in the wood shop by Stephanie.
Sample books, handmade and leather-bound by Crystal.
Egg’s Samuel side table, made from solid, hand-waxed bronze, was originally developed for a project they did for the New York City Ballet. “We were asked to do a seating installation in their promenade space, a series of tiling benches and tables that are now on permanent display. We adapted the height to become part of our collection,” says Hillary.
The brass and marble hexagonal Hawley table is one of Egg’s best known pieces. “We show these in a number of finishes, because like to show what happens when brass patinas. Sometimes clients like that, sometimes they don’t, but we love it. We think brass is a live finish and it should be allowed to patinize over time,” says Hillary.
Egg’s Margot George chandelier is named after Crystal’s grandmother. “We name all of our pieces after friends or family,” she explains. “So all of the names of the pieces in the collection are people we know. We think about a piece and how it feels, and maybe it’s funny to think about furniture as being masculine or feminine, but it’s always a fun task.”
A set of faceted bronze bookends were created for the New York design show Reclaim x2, in collaboration with Hangar Design Studio.
Egg’s first collection, much of which is seen in this photo, was inspired by looking at gemstones and naturally occurring geometries.
“I got this on a website called Brooms By Henry,” says Crystal. “Henry grows his own broom grass and he makes these beautiful brooms by hand. You’d buy that in Brooklyn for 150 bucks. But this was like $12, and he sent it with a picture of himself standing in his grass field and a handwritten note. After we got it, we were like, ‘Can we rep Brooms By Henry? I want to support this man.’”
The studio is also filled with vintage oddities, like jewelry caskets, old glass bulbs, and this cast-iron horse head, whom the three refer to as Rusty.
The beautifully produced Wright auction house catalog is Egg’s “favorite magazine. We subscribe to it!” says Crystal. In terms of other forms of inspiration, she says, “I spend a lot of time gathering pictures of furniture off of 1stdibs, and we keep an internal blog that we just share among ourselves. It’s a nice way to keep a conversation going when we don’t have time to sit down and talk for 30 minutes every day.”
We visited the studio the day after Stephanie’s birthday, though we all agreed balloon-as-decor ought to be a more permanent fixture.
At the end of our visit we headed upstairs to the workshop, where various pieces were in progress. Of their process, Stephanie says: “We try to keep design time sacred. It’s harder to do now, because we’re also running the business on top of designing. But basically we design the work; Crystal oversees design development, so she’ll take it through renderings and a myriad of options before we come back together. Hillary’s our front of house, so she manages our subcontractors, keeps in touch with our clients, keeps our books, keeps our schedule. I run our shop, so I am in charge of fabrication and making sure everything gets executed in a timely fashion and prototyping and things of that nature.”
A Francis desk being finished.
This sign belonged to a neighbor, but we couldn’t resist snapping it! For anyone wanting to visit, the Egg Collective showroom is open by appointment.
Here at Sight Unseen, we have a pretty strict bias against kitsch. But every so often we stumble upon a project that, while somewhat gimmicky, injects so much fun into the daily routine and has such roots in formal and material investigation, that it’s impossible to deny its utter lovability. We discovered such a project from the Leicester, England–based creative duo 12 Dozen Egg Cups, whose initial outing to a pottery class at a local community center developed into a challenge to repurpose the ubiquitous egg cup 144 different ways in the space of 12 months.
This week we announced the 2014 American Design Hot List, Sight Unseen's unapologetically subjective annual editorial award for the 25 names to know now in American design. We're devoting an entire week to interviews with this year's honorees — get to know the next five Hot List designers here.
“Another Cats Show” may have started as a one-liner, but that doesn’t mean it fails to land the joke. The exhibition, which closed this week at the Los Angeles gallery 356 Mission, included feline-themed pieces from 301 artists and proved that what they say about die-hard cat lovers is pretty much true: They may be crazy, but they also totally mean it. “People assume cats will be funny,” says Ooga Booga founder Wendy Yao, a partner in the space. “It is casual and inclusive, and gives artists a chance to do something not quite as monumental.”
