How Crude´s furniture emerged as a response to interior design 

Story for Being Designs Magazine of Crude. Crude is a unique studio that blends creativity with practicality in interior and furniture design. Crude prioritizes materials and context, crafting spaces that truly resonate with our clients’ environments.

Crude is a multidisciplinary design studio named for the raw quality present in natural materials. The studio’s furniture is made primarily of oak, and it is the wood’s roughness and imperfection that define its character and the sensation of natural tone and texture. This quality was the studio’s foundation and has continued to guide their evolution.

Sheila Llovet founded Crude in 2018. She began as an interior designer, with a vision of spaces centered around the concept of raw, quality material. Before founding the studio, Sheila traveled extensively and was deeply influenced by her experiences of different cultures. She was inspired by a quality present in certain spaces and objects, such as the presence of traditional African craftsmanship or the spiritual undertone of the churches by the Belgian Monk Hans van der Laan, a character that embodied both serenity and stability.

Each interior design project presented a new need for furniture, and Crude began to develop their approach to objects, based on a subtle geometric language and an awareness of the surrounding space. There are no decorative elements in Crude’s pieces. The identity of each object emerges through an understanding of material and geometric shapes. The Japanese architect Jo Nagasaka took a similar approach to space-making, designing through a process of reduction; always returning to “a relationship that allows for change.” In many ways, this adaptive relationship has been a guiding principle in Crude’s work. Over time materials change, spaces change, and human lives change. Crude’s work embraces these fluctuations, creating objects that adapt to life and age with grace.

The design world is at a point of transition. Industrialized processes and visual media have led to a market where superficial aesthetics are often valued over functional reality. At the same time, people are beginning to reconnect with the value of objects made with human consciousness. Designers play a fundamental role in this transition. They are the bridge between the craftsman and the consumer, maintaining the web of relationships that shape our future. Through these relationships, artisan knowledge is kept alive and modernized. Crude’s furniture is an embodiment of circular design, built for decades of use and eventually natural decomposition.

Crude is a multidisciplinary design studio named for the raw quality present in natural materials.

Fine art has been a constant aspect of Crude’s practice as interior designers. Not as an additional, decorative element, but as something soulful and essential, weaving a spiritual quality into a space. As the studio moved into the realm of furniture design, there was more space for this creative exploration. This took the shape of an ongoing series of collaborations with emerging artists, each resulting in a unique piece of collectible design. In the last year, these creative encounters have deepened Crude’s approach to material and form. From the rustic pit fire ceramics of the Spanish artist Yoyo Balagué to Crude’s most recent collaboration, exploring the potential of cork with the Belgian designer Cedric Etienne.

In a world increasingly pressed for time, absence has become as important as presence. Absence of distractions, decorations, complications. Absence is the counterpart to presence. In the words of the modernist sculptor Constantin Brâncuși, “Simplicity is not an end in art, but one arrives at simplicity in spite of oneself, in approaching the real sense of things.”

“Simplicity is not an end in art, but one arrives at simplicity in spite of oneself, in approaching the real sense of things.”

Moving into 2024, Crude has begun developing a brand that will correspond to their emerging furniture collection. A process of natural evolution, leading them into further material exploration and artistic collaborations within the realm of collectible design.

Crude will continue to design in a way that is both liveable and meaningful, developing soulful objects that relate with honesty to their surroundings.

Furniture & Interiors by Crude

Written by Savannah Angela