During my internship at Arhaus I was tasked to identify a "whitespace" in the company's product line and design a collection into that space. I decided to work within the Bedroom category, and began by matching every collection in the current Arhaus line with the collections in competitors lines which filled the same design niche. After eliminating those, I looked for similarities in the remaining competitor collections which did not have an analogue within Arhaus' offering. Through this process I identified a style I called "Soft Geometry," defined by minimalist geometric forms with soft curves, in natural finishes which celebrate the materiality of the designs.
The ideation process was split between explorations of form—finding a carcass shape which was simple and fitting with the style, yet distinct from products already on the market—and research into material treatments and finishes which accented that form without drawing attention from it. This process went through many rounds of sketches, presentation, and feedback with members of the Design, Merchandising and Product Development teams, whose insight dramatically shaped the end product. Ultimately the team responded extremely well to the use of a hand hewn texture on select wooden faces the cabinet, broken up by nubuck panels on drawer faces, pulled together with brass hardware in a sand cast texture.
The Thoreau Bedroom Collection is a love letter to natural materials and hand-crafted textures. Referencing the soft brutalism of late-seventies modern design, the heavy forms of the cases are offset by soft curves and velvety nubuck. The minimalist, unornamented construction of the cases draws attention to the hand hewn texture of the wood, subtly accenting a dry, natural oak finish. The nubuck drawers are finished with custom brass hardware, whose sand cast texture reflects the raw materiality of the wood.
