Faye Toogood, Roly Poly Chair, UK, 2018

Since founding her eponymous studio in 2008, English designer Faye Toogood (b. 1977) has released her visionary works in a series of numbered Assemblages, which is the term she uses to refer to her furniture collections. The wonderfully chunky Roly-Poly armchair is from the fourth, launched at the Salone del Mobile in Milan in 2014. As its name suggests, it is part of a series based on squat, bulbous shapes that comprise chairs, tables and benches.

The armchair is likely the most roly-poly of the line, with its concave seat taking the shape of an ice cream scoop, sides swooped high enough to account for armrests. Toogood’s jumping-off point for the collection was her own experience with pregnancy and motherhood, an inspiration that is multifaceted: For one, there are the rounded shapes associated with fertility and, literally, pregnancy; then, the resulting pieces feel inherently childlike, as though drawn from a storybook illustration, and are the result, the designer has said, of seeing the world through her children’s eyes.

Toogood originally created the Roly-Poly armchair in small batches, handcrafting each chair from a clay model and realizing the piece in fiberglass. A collaboration with the Italian manufacturer Driade brought the seat into larger-scale production in an iteration made from polyethylene, making it suitable for both indoor and outdoor use. It comes in ochre yellow, red brick, peat, charcoal, concrete and flesh colors.

Faye Toogood’s name is practically synonymous with her Roly Poly chair. With its chubby legs and bowl-like seat, the now-iconic piece epitomized the trend toward chunky forms that defined avant-garde furniture design in the 2010s. But the visionary British artist’s contributions go far beyond the chair and its similarly robust companion pieces, in disciplines ranging from textiles and ceramics to fashion and home interiors.

“I design holistically, with an overall vision across fashion, furniture and interiors,” she tells 1stDibs. “Furniture is something I return to over and over again and is a very strong part of this vision. I am interested in humans and the way they live — the spaces they inhabit, the clothes they wear, the objects they surround themselves with.”

After a childhood spent running free in the English countryside with nature as her playground, Toogood studied art history at Bristol University rather than attend art school. Her design approach is underpinned by contrast and understandably informed by art history, particularly the mid-20th-century modernism of such British artists as Barbara Hepworth and Alfred Wallis. “For me, it is about playing around with references and our associations, be that with materials or the precious and the raw, the masculine and the feminine,” she explains. “I’m able to use those contrasts to create friction.”

Toogood has exhibited at Phillips and the Victoria & Albert Museum in London, the Triennale in Milan and D Museum in Seoul. In addition, her works are in the permanent collections of institutions worldwide, including the Philadelphia Museum of Art; Dallas Museum of Art; Denver Art Museum; High Museum of Art, in Atlanta; Corning Museum of Glass, in New York; the National Gallery of Victoria, in Melbourne; and the Fabergé Museum in St. Petersburg.

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