NZ take 1, Rupert and Lou

I arrived in New Zealand a few weeks before Christmas, straight off the back of having the most amazing time in Aus, and feeling way more settled and at home there than I ever thought I would. 


Months ago I was trawling google NZ for carpenters, furniture makers and designers, basically anyone who was making things that I liked in the hope that they might need a hand in their workshop and I could learn a thing or two. The first person that replied was Rupert Herring, I found his work on a site called ‘cleverdesign' that brings together a whole load of of Kiwi makers and provides an online platform for their work, it’s pretty special and well worth checking out. 


Anyway in our email correspondence that followed Rupe explained that he had just taken on a huge personal project North of Auckland, the scale of which I found out later. He also has an exhibition starting on Waiheke in a couple of weeks which he needed to make new pieces for. Oh and he and Lou were/are still expecting a baby. We made plans for me to arrive around the 7th of December, I could help with a couple of jobs around the house and get involved with the work for the exhibition. 

Photo Vaness Combier

They had only moved in a couple of weeks before I arrived but Rupe already had a sweet workshop setup and the house was so homely, Lou’s touch. It’s an incredible place, north of Wellsford, tucked well down a ‘metal’ road (dirt track) with land out the back and a view from the kitchen that makes washing up the job of the day. It looks out over rolling hills down to a tidal inlet with a cartoonish landscape on the far shore. It didn’t take long to have the grand tour, and Rupert to start spitballing all his ideas, the short of it being to set up a glamping retreat in their field behind , convert the garage to granny flat for longer term rentals, an outhouse that is currently the games room to a kitchen and lounge for campers as well as a full new workshop, office, exhibition space and coffee shop in another barn. So plenty to keep busy with. Having met them I know they will end up doing all that and more. They have so much energy and are directing it into a really special project, there is so much potential on their wee slice of NZ. 

On my second day, Rupert chucked me straight onto one of his designs for the exhibition, the second in hopefully a series of hall tables made out of repurposed balustrades. I am so thankful for him trusting a complete random bloke with long hair to produce one of his designs (under his watchful eye), When I thanked him for taking a punt on me he just said "If you had f$%k%d it up I would've just had to make it again". Workshop life is pretty perfect with good music and good company. I'm pretty chuffed with how the table turned out.

​I wrote a short kinda statement for Rupert and his work which really sums up my time with them and a lot of it is based around a mutual attitude to design.

"Our impact on the world is vast, and worryingly far from the limits of its extent. Some of us question our personal contribution to this on a daily basis, whilst the majority of us carry on without out a second thought, pausing every other week to take out the recycling. Then there is Rupert Herring, for whom recycling isn’t something to do because it’s what we “should” be doing. With a desire to create beautiful objects, a moral obligation to our planet and an aversion to consumerism and our throwaway society he has turned it into his livelihood.


Rupert’s work flirts along a delicate line between sculpture and furniture. Working almost entirely with found material, specifically timber, he sees wonder and potential far deeper than surface appearance and often completely detached from the materials original use. He aims to answer his own question, "why are we not using up what we already have?" The environment has already paid the price for so much, why take more? Rupert breaks the mould of the in-vogue concept of up-cycling, and far from simply using timber from pallets and whisky barrels, he searches for the beauty hidden in an objects original form. Through slicing, arranging, rearranging and even turning inside out he finds such beauty.

His work takes time, huge quantities of it, but he finds joy in the monotony of preparation and in the knowledge that the process has begun. The process which creates refined objects of a quality not often realised in found materials. Perhaps its his homage to the time it’s taken for the material to reach him or maybe to the new lease of life that he gives it and the will to make things to last far longer than a human life span. Probably all of the above, but in amongst all that it's because he is the sort of person who won’t let anything leave his workshop until it’s… ’nice’."

Thanks for having me guys it's been the perfect start to my time in NZ. Catch you soon.

Check out more of Rupert's work at http://www.thecleverdesignstore.com/designers/rupert-herring.html