Unlock Editor’s Digest for free

Roula Khalaf, editor-in-chief of the FT, selects her favorite stories in this weekly newsletter.

At this year’s London Design Festival in September, in one of the Victoria and Albert Museum’s Medieval and Renaissance galleries, three attractive and unusual pieces of furniture in a range of sumptuous leathers and soft colors stood out.

Under her brand Modular by Mensah, the British Ghanaian designer Kusheda Mensah creates playful, interlocking, interactive puzzle-like shapes to encourage people to come together. But “Un-hide: Recading Luxury” also addressed another theme: leather is associated with exclusivity and luxury products, but also with environmental damage and waste. Mensah wanted to remind visitors of its sustainable potential as a by-product, while celebrating its tactile and emotional qualities. “If you eat meat or cheese, you have to think about leather. I want to show his potential,” she says.

I wanted to reuse this tactile material — it can be feminine and seductive

Mensah is one of a growing number of artists and designers recently inspired to rethink and reshape the way we use leather, encouraged by improved animal welfare, better use of by-products and waste and the development of more environmentally friendly tanning methods.

Mensah worked with Scottish company Bridge of Weir Leather, which makes leathers for cars.interiors since 1905. Today, thanks to a chrome-free tanning process, it claims to produce the lowest carbon leather in the world, with a “life cycle analysis” score of 8 kg of CO2 equivalent (carbon dioxide equivalent). carbon) per square meter on average. Additionally, Mensah only used surplus aniline or nubuck leather. “I wanted to reuse this tactile material to bring people together, using different colors and textures,” she says. “It can be feminine and seductive.”

Leather is by no means a new material for Bill Amberg Studio. For 40 years, it has defended this material for its beauty, durability and acoustic properties. The company’s innovative uses range from leather stairs to papooses. Most recently she designed seating for the Royal Academy’s new Benjamin West Lecture Theatre, in association with David Chipperfield. architects.

But despite their long relationship with leather, Bill Amberg and his team are constantly evolving and rethinking how they use it. Today, the studio uses vegetable-tanned leathers wherever possible, processed from the skins of pasture-raised European animals and offering higher well-being, which Amberg says “leads to healthy, happy skin “. The Knepp collection of chairs, stools and log baskets, for example, uses hides from the Knepp estate, renowned for its rewilding project, in West Sussex. The difference is clearly visible in animals, he says. “People are often amazed by the great diversity of leathers. »

Amberg is interested in the “mixture” of techniques “used in saddlery, cabinetmaking, bookbinding and shoemaking.” Its curved bench, reception desk and console for the entrance to the London office of law firm DLA Piper, at 160 Aldersgate Street, all employ a double-needle hand-stitching technique used for saddles. “You couldn’t do that with a machine,” he said. At the center of the company’s 40th anniversary retrospective exhibition, also at the London Design Festival, was its Stack Table, its top made from hundreds of scrap strips, stacked as you would to create shoe heels and smoothed to obtain a multi-colored finish.

Maria Speake, of Retrouvius Design Studio, is another designer repurposing and reinventing old or unloved leather. Her husband and business partner Adam Hills had salvaged leather panels from the old Marylebone Town Hall when it was renovated to create the London Business School. For years they sat in storage, their color an “unattractive bad tan,” Speake says. Hills suggested reversing them to show the suede side. “With a rich, textured, inviting quality, they felt completely different.”

Inspired by the way stately homes across Europe hung “Cordoba Leather,” or cording—painted or gilded and embossed leather—on their walls, Speake hung the hides in his own home. Others quickly wanted it, so Hills collected several vans full of surplus leather from an upholsterer (Speake acknowledges that one of the disasters of the interior trade is wastage levels of up to 20 per hundred). These hides, in “an extraordinary mix of colors”, were turned over to create panels with their identifying stamps visible, which she used for kitchens, joinery and cabinets.

However, it’s not just about functional objects. Artist and designer Frances Pinnock initially trained as a model and puppet maker in Bournemouth, but explored shoes in the final weeks of her BA and discovered the charm of leather. “There seemed to be a nice overlap between pattern cutting and hand stitching and the idea of ​​the shoe as an extension of the body, like a puppet,” she says. This led her to oak bark-tanned leather, produced using age-old methods and local hides by J&FJ Baker and Co in Devon, the last British tannery to do so.

It takes 14 months to produce a J&FJ Baker and Co hide. The resulting leather is thick, durable and in high demand for custom shoes. This also proved ideal for Pinnock’s sculptures – sometimes vessel-like forms, sometimes figurative, sometimes abstract.

Shortlisted for this year’s Ingram Prize for Visual Artists, Pinnock is currently developing work for a solo exhibition at Sarah Myerscough Gallery in spring 2025. Although she now also uses metal and paint, the emotional impact of leather is the base. It’s a connection that a growing number of creators and designers like to explore.

Check out our latest stories first – follow @ft_houseandhome on Instagram