Stripe, Crafted

If, last Christmas, you visited the lobby at Claridge’s hotel to see the magnificent Christmas tree that Paul guest-designed, then you likely would have noticed a congregation of small, ramshackle wooden creatures gathered around the base of the 20ft festive showstopper. These curious critters were created by Studiomama, an east London-based design studio formed of husband-and-wife duo Jack Mama and Nina Tolstrup. Lovingly dubbed the ‘Off-Cuts’, Jack and Nina began making these creatures some years ago as a way to give new life to the scrap wood they had lying around the workshop. The Off-Cuts have since come to be like mascots for Studiomama, embodying Jack and Nina’s sense of playfulness, their idiosyncratic design language, and their inventive use of materials.

We visited them in their east London workshop as the creatures took shape. Making them stripy presented a unique challenge, one which the pair gamely rose to. Inventing their own process through trial and error, Nina and Jack employed pressure cookers filled with dye to colour thin sheets of wood in a variety of shades, which they then layered up and glued together. Compressing these layers in a vice forms them into solid blocks, allowing them to be cut into different shapes: the torso of a bird-like character called Douglas (more on that later), a beak, or a head with long rabbit ears.

Each creature has its own name and personality, and the whole stripy gang – including Douglas the daydreamer, style icon Hyacinth, and the perpetually relaxed Bob – have now migrated from Studiomama’s east London workshop to our Mayfair flagship shop in the heart of west London, a journey that’s been depicted in a charming animated short created by Jack and Nina’s son, Otto. Pay us a visit on Albemarle Street to see them for yourself.

Stripe, Crafted is now on display at Paul Smith, 9 Albemarle Street, W1S 4BL.