One shade of grey

Product design

It has been a successful year for interior architects i29 and they recently presented a pop-up shop at luxury fashion shop SPRMRKT in Amsterdam to launch their latest project As Good As New.

By Cassandra Pizzey /asdf 27-09-2012

With nominations and prizes (including a Great Indoors Award for Tribal DDB) all around, it has been a good year for i29. Now they have broadened their expertise launching As Good As New, a brand-new, second-hand furniture label in cooperation with Gummo and Krimpex. .

The idea sprung from the office design of advertising brand Gummo, in which the designers created a recycled office inside the old Parool newspaper building. All the furniture for the office was sourced from a online marketplace, charity shops and found in the old office, then sprayed with a grey resin to conform with the new colour scheme and house style.
Because of the huge buzz around the project both on and offline, i29 decided to create a new, second-hand furniture brand available to the public.

“All products where selected from charity shops, Marktplaats (the dutch eBay), and vintage markets such as the IJ-hallen in Amsterdam North, NDSM area”, says Jeroen Dellensen of i29. “The grey coating is a solvent-free polyurea coating. It’s an industrial resin normally used for covering swimming pools, load trucks etc., also known as bedliner. We chose this material because it sticks to almost everything, and is very durable.”

“Selecting these items, was an adventure by itself. We selected quite outspoken and weird items”, explains Dellensen. “The collection of second hand furniture in one and the same finish becomes a powerful unified sculptural image, it has an surrealistic alienating effect. But the message of this work is mostly about giving some attention to re-used and recycled furniture. We are giving these items a second life. And in the case of the more vulgar pieces we even up-cycled them in an aesthetic sense.”

The products were recently on show in a pop-up shop at SPRMRKT. Dellensen: “Looking for a good place to launch our new label, we searched for a vibrant place where lots of people come by who are searching for unique and high end second hand items.”

“Everything in SPRMRKT’s recycled home is covered in a matte, dark-grey nuance, which gives the little shop a highly conceptual look with arty vintage furniture mixing in perfectly in SPRMRKT’s high-fashion universe", explains Nelleke Strijkers, owner of SPRMRKT. Thanks to Nelleke As Good As New collaborated with the design company Vipp. A limited edition of customized vintage Vipp pedal bins where integrated in the ‘AsGoodAsNew’ pop-up shop.