The Luxe Collection: A New Measure of Precision

A new collection by James Patterson, the British designer behind Rustic, Textures, and City, in deeply carved solid oak on solid brass.

In Brief

Pieces

Sideboard, low media console, two-drawer console, one-drawer bedside, round dining table, round coffee table

Sizes

Sideboard 193.6 × 51 × 81 cm. Media console 201.6 × 51 × 51 cm. Console 153 × 38 × 82 cm. Bedside 64.4 × 40 × 58 cm. Dining table 130 cm across, 76 cm high. Coffee table 100 cm across, 40 cm high

Finish

Carved solid oak in black-brown dry oak, on solid brass 10 mm thick with a bronze finish

Designer

James Patterson, also behind Rustic, Textures, and City for Dantone Home

Prices

From AED 3,590 to AED 8,970

Available

Online and at the Dantone Home showrooms

A limited edition from the designer whose collections have stayed in the Dantone Home range for years

James Patterson has designed for Dantone Home since the beginning, and his hand runs through a good deal of what the brand has become. Rustic, Textures, City: collections drawn years apart, each of them still in the range, each taking a different position on what wood can be asked to do.

Six pieces, one pattern, cut at six different lengths

Luxe is the one where that question is pushed furthest. It arrives now in six pieces, for the dining room, the living room, the hallway, and the bedroom. The collection began with a single decision: that not one surface would be left flat.

Where the Carving Stops

It does not. The relief runs the whole of every front, and continues round the sides and across the backs of the round pieces, without a plain panel, without a border, and without a quiet corner where the work was allowed to ease off.

The carving continues across the join, so the doors read as one panel

Carving into solid timber is unforgiving in a way that applied decoration never is. Material comes away and does not come back. Every block in the pattern is a series of final cuts, repeated across surfaces the length of a room wall, and the rhythm has to hold from the first cut to the last.

I am fascinated by natural materials, which are simple and honest yet allow for unlimited freedom of thought: a single piece of wood can become anything and everything

James Patterson

Depth on a facade is worked in millimetres, and those millimetres decide how a piece lives in a room. Flat fronts hand the light straight back and settle into the wall behind them. These fronts hold shadow inside every cut, so a surface that reads almost black at midday gains its full relief under a lamp after dark, and the room gains something that shifts while nobody is watching.

The pale facets are the cut ends of the oak, exposed where the blade went across the grain

The Line of Brass

Dark oak worked this deeply absorbs almost everything the room gives it. The brass answers that: 10 mm of solid metal in a bronze finish, running as a single bright line at the base of each piece.

Fixed in oak, the pattern is redrawn by every hour of the day

It is the only reflective element in the collection, and it does three things at once. It catches whatever light the room has and returns it. It draws a hard edge beneath a broken, restless surface. And it lifts a considerable mass clear of the floor, so that the piece stands rather than sits.

No handle interrupts the pattern – the front gives the hand enough to hold

Against pale timber the same brass would read as trim. Under black-brown dry oak it reads as structure: warm rather than gold, closer to the tone of the wood than to the shine of a fitting.