They Remade Old Wood From Demolished Houses, and Left Time Inside the Furniture | 100 People With Ideas

The foreign designers at JoMo design used to make upcycled pieces that only foreigners bought. Then they tried a set of tables where the traces of reuse are hard to spot — and this time more Chinese buyers came around.

JoMo design's work was shown for the first time in the Limited Edition hall at Design Shanghai, a small room whose floor held only about five tables; the rest had their legs taken off and were hung on the wall. The tables were mostly blue or green, with fine, dense stripes, a little like a banana leaf. Only from the grain — cut finer than any wood flooring — could you just make out that they were wood.

The two designers, Jonas Merian and Moritz Spielberg, stood in the hall the whole time, explaining through an interpreter that the wood had been pulled out of old houses on Kangding Road, in Shanghai's old city center.

The wood already carried its own color. They laid it down strip by strip, a collage, then poured a layer of epoxy resin over it to hold the pieces and protect them, much the way amber is made.

Under the old wood is a 5-centimeter layer of solid wood, and the resin on top works like a magnifying glass, letting you look closely at the state of the material: the black spots and the faded patches are sharp, and under the resin they look refined. Many people did not recognize it as wood at all, let alone as something reused.

They put up 11 tables in all. The largest, a 1×2-meter long table, was priced at 80,000 yuan; the smallest, a round table 35 centimeters across, at 10,000 yuan. By the time the show closed they had sold four.

JoMo design's studio sits inside a wedding-photography compound on the outskirts of Shanghai; it was a warehouse to begin with. The compound is full of people borrowing the scenery for photo shoots, and it houses a number of design teams too, among them Tongji University professor Philip F. Yuan's Five-Dimensional Tea Room and the design studio of the Zhiyin team.

On the afternoon of the interview, Jonas Merian was in the studio making the 12th table in his Kangding Road series. He had just fitted the cut pieces of wood into a round frame, ready to pour the resin. The grain on this one was unlike the other 11, he said, smiling: "So each one is one of a kind."

Jonas Merian is a bald Swiss man who has been in China for ten years. He used to be a prosthetics specialist, and spent more than a year in North Korea with the Red Cross before he came here. In 2009 he gave up his job as Asia technical director for an Icelandic prosthetics company, wanting to live freely — or else to leave China.

"I don't have to listen to a boss telling me what to do anymore. The only boss is myself," he said.

He married a Chinese woman named Nina, and the two of them moved into this 200-square-meter warehouse. Nina quit her job at almost the same time he did; she had been working at the art center under Tongji University's science and technology department. Together they built a loft office, a photo studio and a home.

The first renovation of the warehouse cost about 100,000 yuan. "To save money, we used secondhand bricks and wood flooring from a demolished house," Jonas Merian said. Nearly all the furniture in the warehouse was made from old things, and that is what got him interested in carrying on. Jonas and Nina filmed the work and put the videos online; six months later a number of media outlets came to interview them, describing their life as a "utopia."

Both of them were, in truth, only trying it out. The New York Times wrote about their way of living in May 2014, and at the time Nina let some worry show: they had 7,500 yuan of rent to pay every month.

Jonas Merian likes to upcycle old biscuit tins. Every side of these boxes carries Chinese-style advertising imagery — figures like Chang'e, or Western-style dolls. He says he buys them from a man who goes around the Chinese countryside collecting old objects, then fits them with LED bulbs or uses them as they are, as bookshelves and other furniture. The shape of the tins is barely altered, and the black spots left by fading and wear are kept exactly as they were. There are at least 100 old tins, in different designs, in his studio.

The studio is also piled with small upcycled things: a round metal basin used straight away as a coffee-table top, tires turned into chairs, an aluminum kettle turned into a pendant lamp. He has made a few serious large pieces of furniture as well, though he likes to keep the raw, rough quality of the material. One long wooden table is simply nailed together from pieces of different woods, colors and shapes, with gaps between them and the edges left unsanded, which gives the table a rugged character.

These upcycled pieces are not cheap. An ordinary biscuit-tin lamp sells for 580 yuan, the long table for about 30,000 yuan.

At design shops in Beijing and Shanghai, similar old furniture is mostly picked up from secondhand markets or old houses, its original form intact, with the designer doing no more than cleaning and repair. When old furniture is used to make something in a new style, it is usually paired with other materials rather than altered: the design shop brut cake on Anfu Road, for instance, sets old tables and chairs against hand-sewn xiabu ramie cloth, making products that fit the brand's identity, with the furniture serving only as a support for the cloth.

Jonas Merian sells his upcycled pieces on Etsy and in small shops on Anfu Road, and every year he takes part in markets in Shanghai, Taipei, Hangzhou and elsewhere, talking to visitors himself. He came to realize that the people buying his lamps and furniture were foreigners too. One foreign customer bought a radio and told him it was really cool; others commissioned tables. "Very few Chinese people buy my things. To Chinese people my stuff is too rough."

He has worked out the reason himself: "On one hand you think what I sell is expensive, and on the other you think it's cheap — worthless junk that should be thrown out. But these biscuit tins are very well made. They've been around for more than 40 years already and you can keep using them. I've given them a new purpose, kept the history in them, and they'll last many more years."

Price aside, though, he thinks the bigger reason is that upcycling as a form simply isn't recognized here: "China has a lot of designers doing craft work, but not many doing upcycling."

The other designer, Moritz Spielberg, agrees: "In the US or Europe, people may not upcycle exactly, but they do reuse old things. Young people inherit furniture from their grandparents' generation, or buy it secondhand. Old furniture isn't put in storage, it's actually used. Here the more common thing is to throw it away."

Moritz Spielberg met Jonas Merian at a market in Hangzhou in 2013. He is a German with professional training in woodwork, more reserved than Jonas. Before he came he thought China was a place with plenty of work; once here he quickly saw that "everything revolves around time and money, and the pace is extremely fast." What surprised him most was the speed of renewal — after a few years many shops and buildings are torn down and put up again, and even a traditional building like the Forbidden City carries plenty of new construction. "There's very little thinking about design itself here. People just care about making things nonstop and showing them to people."

The other side of that speed is that things also get made faster: in Europe the same object would take far longer and cost far more. Moritz and Jonas both hold a dialectical view — there is always a good side and a bad side — but when it comes to making furniture and finding materials, Shanghai is a place that gives them a reason to stay.

Around that time the Danish fabric brand kvadrat invited 22 artists and designers worldwide to design pieces using kvadrat fabric, and the two of them, with another German, Ana Schönberger, who was studying at Shanghai Jiao Tong University, made a fan 2.5 meters high and 4 meters wide. The base and frame were wood left over from a demolished old house, and the surface used kvadrat's Divina fabric, again pieced together as a collage. What made it unusual is that the two sides are different colors: one combines brown, green, blue and gray, taken from the palette of the Northern Song painter Wang Ximeng's A Thousand Li of Rivers and Mountains; the other combines blue, green, purple and gray, taken from the tones of Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa. The fan was exhibited in Milan and is still in their studio — "it can be used as a stage backdrop or a screen." Selling it would obviously not be easy: it was expensive to make, and there is plenty of more practical furniture to buy instead. The Kangding Road series shows something of the same thing — an element of upcycling, plus Chinese motifs and contemporary art.

Moritz Spielberg was more interested in the old wood itself. Seeing Jonas Merian's upcycling, he realized there was a chance to do more with it in Shanghai. He often rode his bike around Shanghai's old streets looking for wood left behind in demolished houses. At the end of 2015 he found a place on Kangding Road, in Jing'an District, that sold old wood; he pulled out cash with practiced ease, picked out the blue and green pieces and hauled them back to the studio. They came from the floorboards or door panels of old houses: a bundle of about ten 2-meter strips cost 150 yuan.

"In Europe it's very hard to find wood like this. Old buildings are all protected, you can't go in and tear them apart. In the 1960s a lot of buildings were demolished and rebuilt, but now that's rare, and even if you found some it would be extremely expensive. Wood like this, from floors, walls and ceilings, is very rare."

The color of the Kangding Road wood was a real surprise to him. Because it had been painted over and over, the wood carried about three layers of color, and after long use some of the inner colors would jump out or blend, to different degrees, with the surface layer — like oil paint, with real depth to it. That is why they ended up calling the tables the "Kangding Road Furniture Series."

"I wanted the surface to be different from how it started, so I poured resin over it, and then I realized how beautiful the effect was," Moritz Spielberg said.

The new series leans much more on the color, grain and decorative quality of the material itself, and it is far more refined — very different from the upcycling Jonas Merian used to do on his own, but the direction he had wanted to move in. Out of his own market experience and his own observations he talked through a design that Chinese buyers would be more likely to accept: "We decided to make things that were smoother, more dreamlike, more refined, more brightly colored."

For this they set up a separate brand, JoMo design, the name a combination of Jonas Merian and Moritz Spielberg. As they see it, it is a pairing in which each can learn from the other: Jonas has been in China a long time, knows the market and has plenty of hands-on experience, while Moritz, who arrived not long ago, brings the professional training.

Showing the furniture at Design Shanghai was an experiment. When they first agreed to take part they had meant to show other work; at that point they had not even found the Kangding Road wood. As it turned out, a lot of people liked the new series, and some buyers took their tables home and hung them on the wall as art, which made the two of them very proud. "You need to explain that this is old wood from a demolished house on Kangding Road. Once people know that, they get even more excited."

After Design Shanghai they took two more sets of tables to the Xiansuo design show on Nanjing West Road. Visitors kept asking the staff about prices, but a week into the show nothing had sold. As the staff there put it: "Everyone likes it, but it's just too expensive."

Price, though, is the thing they will not give way on. Because of all the early experimenting, one table takes about a month of working days to make; gluing the pieces of wood together alone takes 60 hours. "We tried going faster, but the results weren't good." Jonas Merian reckons the tables he used to make on his own could sell fine at 30,000 yuan; the new series pools the work of two people, and besides, "there isn't much difference between more expensive and expensive."

For a new brand, the "Kangding Road Furniture Series" gave them some confidence to keep going, but it also showed them the drawbacks: handwork eats up too much time and money, and the high prices make the furniture hard to sell. For the next series they plan to work with a factory that can copy and mass-produce the pieces, bringing the price down, aiming at a wider public and selling better. They have already found a good manufacturing partner that can guarantee quality. "We might not use old wood anymore. We want to make something different," Moritz Spielberg said, with certainty.

Photos taken on site and provided by JoMo design.