How designer Faezah Shaharuddin’s playful experimentation with form and function led to founding Studio Kallang

The pieces are hand‑crafted by trained woodworkers in Indonesia. “Furniture, to me, is home and belonging. It can represent a lot of things, from culture to mood, or identity,” shares Faezah, who adds that she takes inspiration from “everything around me”, and that her design style and aesthetic is not clear‑cut. “I try to design around the emotions of nostalgia and memories. I think it always evolves with whatever I’m paying attention to at the moment, whether it’s a song, someone’s outfit, a really cool building I see, or the state of the world. I think it’s always changing to kind of reflect the times, like piecing together cultural fragments.”

Designers sometimes get pinned into one style, she says, and they get stuck doing it. “A lot of people say that [my pieces] give off a mid‑century or a bit of a modernist [style]; I kind of like how everyone sees their own style in [my design aesthetic]. I want to keep it open so that in the future, I can shift my trajectory because I don’t want to keep making the same thing forever,” she expounds. She adds that when something catches her eye, “I try to take as many notes and pictures as possible in the moment, and then I try my best to turn it into something when I get back to the studio. But I think [my output] is a bit slower now, as I really want to reflect and take my time to make sure it’s really something I want to put out.”

For Faezah, function always comes first. “If a client says, ‘I need a table’, it has to be a functional table. You need to be able to sit comfortably [at the table] and put stuff on it. Once I get that out of the way, then I work out the aesthetics in more detail. But I like to work in the sweet spot between design and art; I like [things] to be a bit ambiguous,” she says. To date, clients have included brands such as Diptyque and Charles & Keith. One of her favourite designers is American sculptor, furniture designer and landscape architect Isamu Noguchi. She reveals that she admires “his sculptural forms and how he makes them look not only simple, but also striking”.

She also cites Italian architect and designer Gae Aulenti, who works in the Italian modernist style, but with a bit of eccentricity and a bit of flair; and Japanese fashion designer Issey Miyake, whose fabric manipulation techniques impress her. “I remember always liking fashion from a young age,” recalls Faezah. “My mum still has all these sketches I used to love drawing, of ballgowns and outlandish outfits. So I think that’s where my interest in the arts began.”

Her mother is in the furniture manufacturing business, which gave her early exposure to the industry. “As a teenager, I got roped in to work at the weekends, because it was a small business,” she says. “I’d work during the holidays, even in university during summer break. [During that time], I’d also interact with clients, so I learnt a lot about furniture.” In fact, the name Studio Kallang was derived from the address of the warehouse the family business operated from on Kallang Avenue, a place where “I spent a lot of my youth at and it just holds a lot of meaning for me”, shares Faezah.

This April, she was one of seven Singapore designers and collectives who participated in the Future Impact 2 exhibition organised by DesignSingapore Council at Milan Design Week. “That was my first major exhibition for Studio Kallang, so I was quite excited and it was a big learning opportunity,” she enthuses. Using wood offcuts from her furniture production, she demonstrated the need for sustainable designs in our living spaces with furniture engineered to remove carbon dioxide from the air.

Read more: For Milan Design Week 2024, visit Bocci’s designer showroom housed in a 20th-century apartment

Wood, she shares, is one of her favourite materials to work with “because I like its inherent warmth. I think it’s a very fascinating material because it looks different depending on how you cut it with the different grains. So it has an element of uniqueness and unpredictability. Even if the design is the same, it’s like you have a one‑of‑a‑kind piece.”

Faezah is also keen to experiment with other materials, such as fabric, metal or even acrylic. For now, the best part about being a furniture designer, she says, “is being able to translate inspiration and creative energy into something that brings joy to others”.

NOW READ

Legacy Building: How Roger&Sons’s Morgan Yeo is honouring his late father’s legacy

Penang’s hidden gem: A studio tour of salvaged timber treasures

Why Oniatta Effendi wants to revive the traditional art of batik