Design crushes are, for me, a bit like buses it seems, nothing really sets my pulse racing for quite a while and then suddenly I’m declaring undying lust for several all at the same time. OK, not quite like buses then, but this is the second Design Crush in as many weeks, so you get my drift. I try to keep this series quite tight and only feature the things that truly make my heart sing (as opposed to the countless things I save on Pinterest boards all the time), but when this dropped into my inbox a few weeks ago as the winner of MADE.Com‘s Emerging Talent Award, about to go live on the site (any day now), I couldn’t help but fall a little madly in love with its ingenuity and Wes Anderson colour palette. 

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 Images: MADE.Com

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We all love a good marriage of function and form and this design is just that. The Cairn bedside table was built around a design brief for small space living, and it perfectly encapsulates the need for furniture to hold purpose whilst retaining a design sensibility which is thoroughly cosmopolitan. It is the brainchild of design duo Moon Kim and Tsewang Gensapa who based their piece around the marriage of two thoughts, the aesthetics of the film Shanghai Express, particularly the utility of the Chunking Mansion where it’s shot which led them to look into Kowloon walled city with its ad hoc stacked apartments, and the aesthetics of bamboo steamers which function as an idea in this design to hold separate compartments of storage. 

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Image: MADE.Com

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One of the things I love most about the Cairn is it’s playfulness, which is often missing amongst the serious business of function in design but really shouldn’t be. This bedside table shows how entirely possible, and very covetable, a design in bubblegum hues with all the stylised pull of a Scandinavian classic is, just what I’ve been looking for (without even knowing it, and that’s always clever design in my eyes). The Cairn comes in tones of pink including peach (this summers emerging colour trend) and a lovely set of blue sorbet tones (one of which makes me think of bubblegum flavoured Ice Cream so pink obviously doesn’t have copyright of all the bubblegum hues). 

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Image: MADE.Com

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The Cairns table retails at £199 and is due to land on site over the next few days. I will update a link as soon as it’s live, be still my beating heart til then! Despite currently living in the largest bedroom of my life, I am longing for this piece.

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Image: MADE.Com

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If you are a talented young designer you still have just over a week to enter this years Emerging Talent Award to create a piece with a strong emphasis on material for MADE that will retail across their national platform alongside high profile exposure and royalties in 2018. Have a look at the application process here.