I have this tiny wooden stool, a small slab of rough-hewn wood with three legs. A friend of my mom, an antique dealer, gave it to me when I was a small child. It dawned on me recently that it was sort of an unexpected gift. “Mom, why did Patrick give me that old stool when I was little? What’s so special about it?” “Probably because it's an antique milking stool from the late 1700s.” I recount this story of my tiny, cool, and very old stool because sometimes extraordinarily simple-looking furniture can actually be pretty fucking special.
Maybe what I'm trying to say is that I kind of like being fooled in this way—when you think something is one thing, but it turns out to be another. This makes me think of a very different looking wooden stool, made by the 20th century French designer and urban planner Guy Rey-Millet. There is something unbelievably rustic about Rey-Millet’s furniture design, simple almost to a fault. This Rey-Millet stool that I'm thinking about is basically like a hulking rectangle of untreated wood. You would maybe expect to see something like this in an abandoned factory, as though it literally was just a big piece of wood that someone haphazardly nailed together and decided to use for a chair. But then you realize there's actually a lot of thought and intention that went into the design. It really does feel like a kind of aesthetic trick. And I like it.
-Eugenie Dalland