Nine new pieces for a room with nothing for sale: Cox London at Collect 2020

ART & CULTURE · LONDON

Reading time: 9 min

Every other room at Collect 2020 had a price list. The VIP lounge did not, which makes what Cox London put in it worth pausing on: nine pieces made from scratch, in forged iron, cast bronze, plaster and resin, for a room where nothing was for sale. It is the clearest argument for the fair’s premise that anyone made that week, and it was made in furniture.

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Collect, the Crafts Council’s international fair for contemporary craft and design, ran at Somerset House from 27 February to 1 March 2020, its sixteenth edition and its first in the building. More than forty galleries, around half of them from outside the UK, showed work by over 400 artists.

The Crafts Council invited Cox London to design the fair’s VIP lounge, and Cox London sponsored it. The studio brought in the interior designer Rachel Chudley to curate and art-direct the room with them.

What they made for it is the point. Not a selection from the showroom, and not a set dressed from stock. Nine new pieces, designed and built for a room that would stand for four days and sell nothing.

That is an unusual amount of work to put into a space with no commercial function, and it tells you what the studio thinks the room was for.

What was actually in it

Start with the objects, because they carry the argument.

The furniture ran on a single combination: forged iron and cast bronze, worked together rather than treated as separate registers. Around it sat plaster mirrors, tables with cast glass tops, and light shades made by dipping fabric in resin and setting it into sculpted clay moulds, a process that produces a shade with the stiffness of a shell and the fall of a textile.

The named pieces include the Dada sofa and chair, the Siren chair, the Rig table, the Gunnera table, a Fossil mirror and the Magnolia chandelier. A second chandelier was made in forged iron and jute.

Two of them are worth taking apart properly.

The Dada sofa and chair is the piece Cox London themselves date to this commission, made in 2020 for Collect at Somerset House. It is built from warm golden bronze, natural lamb’s fleece, jute, beech, webbing and wool, and the upholstery is deliberately deconstructed so that the frame, the webbing and the stuffing remain visible. The sofa runs 2,710mm long, 900mm high and 1,170mm deep; the chair is 1,080 by 900 by 800. Its references are gunny sacks, decking and rigging.

The Rig table, which the studio sells as Glass Rig, sets an artisan cast-glass top described as a rippling ocean landscape frozen in time on a golden gilt iron base, with four stretchers anchoring a forged central sphere. 894mm in diameter, 450mm high.

The Siren chair puts cast bronze armrests on a raw forged iron frame and upholsters it in Gotland lamb’s fleece. The Gunnera table is a cast bronze leaf on a tripod of forged iron branches.

Around the furniture, the room was finished in custom paint by Donald Kaufman, laid over a Jan Kath rug that Chudley used as a backdrop. TM Lighting supplied high colour-rendering LED spotlights, aimed so that the beams picked up the patinas and the surface detail rather than washing the room flat.

Two makers from the fair floor were shown inside the lounge as well: Mella Shaw, via Craft Scotland, and David Huycke, via Galerie Marzee.

The building wrote the brief

The team took Somerset House’s naval history as the starting point, and the history is more specific than most people realise.

The Navy Board completed its move into Somerset House in 1789, and the naval departments eventually occupied around a third of the site. The Admiralty stayed until 1873. The building’s Navy Staircase, rebuilt between 1950 and 1952 after bomb damage in 1940, is known today as the Nelson Stair.

So when the studio named one of the two deconstructed sofas ‘Nelson’s Sofaman’, it was not a loose nautical gesture. The room was furnished for a building that ran the Royal Navy’s administration for the better part of a century, in a scheme whose material vocabulary is rope, decking, sacking and rigging.

That is what the exposed webbing on the Dada sofa is doing. A deconstructed upholstery frame and a piece of ship’s rigging are the same idea: the structure is the finish, and the working parts are left where you can see them.

The room is a portrait of the workshop

Chudley has been clear about where she took her cue from, and it was not the fair.

“The thing that really inspired me about the foundry here is how gritty and industrial it is, yet they produce these amazing, gilded objects,” she has said.

That contrast is the room’s organising principle: rough against smooth, raw forged iron against gilt and polished bronze, sacking against fleece. The lounge is a portrait of the place the objects came from, installed inside William Chambers’s neoclassical block on the Strand.

The place in question is an atelier in Tottenham Hale, north London, on a former industrial estate. It is organised into departments that read like a list of trades: fabrication, foundry, patination and wiring. Bronze is cast on site by lost-wax casting, with live pours. Iron is hand-forged. Patination is a standing department with its own apprenticeship route rather than a finish bought in at the end.

Today the atelier runs to more than 65 makers and apprentices, with over a hundred people across the group. Glass is the one area where the studio reaches outward, working with glassmakers in England, Germany and Italy. A fuller account of that workshop and how the studio got there looks at the founders’ own training and the years before Cox London designed a single piece of its own.

Which makes the lounge unusually literal as an argument. A fair devoted to craft asked a studio to furnish its most senior room, and the studio answered by making the furniture, in its own building, in four trades, and then putting the evidence of the making on the outside of every piece.

Two sculptors and a foundry

Christopher and Nicola Cox met studying fine art sculpture at Wimbledon School of Art in the 1990s. The studio dates its beginning to 2004 and its founding to 2005.

Their training explains the workshop. Christopher Cox comes from north London and from three generations of antique dealers, artists and restorers, and trained under the metalwork restorer David Turner before working in London’s antique metalwork trade. Nicola Cox is from New Zealand, trained in glass casting studios and in two bronze foundries, one in London and one in New Zealand, and specialises in lost-wax bronze.

Between them, restoration and casting. One half of the practice learned how old metalwork was made by taking it apart and putting it back together. The other half learned how to pour it.

They describe what they set out to build as “a skilled and versatile, modern-day arts and crafts atelier, creating unique pieces with a reverence to the past that would stand the test of time.” That is the studio placing itself in a lineage, deliberately.

Christopher Cox puts the priority more bluntly. “We are artists first and foremost.” And on why any of it is worth doing: “As humans, we have an innate urge to make, a hunger for it, almost.”

The studio’s own line on finish is the one that matters for this room. “The hand of our makers is evident in everything we produce, the soul and energy of the handmade, with all its atmospheric imperfections on display.”

Christopher Cox connected the studio to the fair directly: “At Cox London, we are foremost artists and makers and, as such, we have an absolute affinity with Collect.”

Nicola Cox described what bringing in a second designer did. “Rachel has been the trigger to release us to go in the direction we wanted to go anyway. We pushed each other.”

A room that made nine things and sold none of them

Now the structural point, and it is the reason this commission is more interesting than a nicely furnished lounge.

Collect is a gallery-presented fair. Galleries, dealers and design collectives apply, and an external advisory panel assesses them on their roster of artists and on how their curation responds to the architecture of Somerset House. Individual makers show through Collect Open, the fair’s separate juried strand, which in 2020 presented twelve craft-led installations.

Exhibiting galleries also work to a freshness rule: eighty per cent of the work offered for sale must have been made in the previous five years.

Cox London made nine pieces from scratch for a room with no price list at all.

They were not selling in the lounge and no rule required anything of them. They could have furnished it from the showroom in an afternoon. Instead the studio met a standard it was exempt from, more strictly than the standard asks, in a room where the only return was that people would sit in it.

That is the fair’s own premise, argued in furniture rather than in a panel discussion. If the claim of a craft fair is that objects made by hand carry something that objects made otherwise do not, then the most persuasive place to test it is the room where nobody is buying, because there is nothing to gain by trying.

What the room turned into

It is worth following what happened next, because the lounge reads differently once you know.

At Collect 2021 Cox London returned as a VIP Programme Supporter and produced a film, The Collectors: Modern Craft in the Hands of Interior Designers, in which Hatta Byng, editor of House & Garden, interviewed interior designers at the Cox London studio. It was shot by Alun Callender, the photographer who had made the images of the 2020 lounge.

In 2024 the studio was headline sponsor of Jay Blades presents Craftworks at Shoreditch Town Hall.

And the studio is now the Crafts Council’s first education partner, running a three-year apprenticeship leading to a City & Guilds Level 3 Diploma in Craft Skills for Creative Industries. Apprentices rotate through fabrication, foundry, patination and wiring in their first year before specialising.

A four-day room turned into a training programme. Christopher Cox has said of making that “craft is also a kind of therapy” and that “we want a little bit of that for everyone”, and the apprenticeship is that sentence turned into a job description.

There is one more piece of context. The lounge came down on 1 March 2020, three weeks before the first national lockdown was announced. Collect 2021 ran entirely online, on Artsy, which means the room Cox London built was the last physical VIP lounge the fair had for two years.

Frequently asked questions

Final thoughts

Fairs are judged on what sells. That is fair enough, and it is how galleries decide whether to come back.

The most interesting room at Collect 2020 had no sales to report.

It had nine new pieces in it, made in a Tottenham workshop by people who cast their own bronze and forge their own iron, put into a building that once ran the Royal Navy, in a scheme that borrowed rope and decking and left the webbing showing.

A deconstructed sofa is a very direct thing to say at a craft fair. It says look at how this is built, and then it makes that possible by refusing to cover it up.

Cox London were not obliged to make anything at all. The room came down after four days.

The argument it made lasted rather longer.