'Lost Stories' by New York-based Yuxuan Huang celebrates furniture's afterlives

A pastime of rummaging through vintage artefacts and trifles at thrift stores provided furniture designer Yuxuan Huang with the inspiration and the ingredients to design a collection pieced together from furniture scraps. Lost Stories, an ongoing series of furniture designs by Huang currently includes a chair, a table and two cabinets, each with a characteristic aesthetic reminiscent of salvage and jigsaw puzzles.

In an official statement about the works, Huang notes that the designs are "a deconstructive reimagination of antique furniture with the aim of passing on the stories of people and objects lost in time." Speaking about her design process, she further elaborates that the task of deconstruction is key to "[reverting] the furniture to a state of raw material" in this way, bringing to the fore the stories each holds—how it was created, how it was used and how it came to be discarded.

Objects in flea markets hold a certain nostalgic allure. They embody a lived-in quality, signs that these were objects that once made up someone's life, were perhaps loved or bought on a whim and never used, but have now ended up being resold, hoping to be adopted by someone else, to make up new stories and new lives. "As a furniture designer, I am well-acquainted with renovation projects featured on social media, as well as with historical references such as the Chest of Drawers from the Droog Design movement. Consequently, the idea of repurposing found furniture naturally comes to mind," the New York-based designer tells STIR, elaborating on her Lost Stories series (2023 - ongoing).

"However, I have chosen a different approach: rather than merely cleaning and preserving the old form, I prefer to give these objects a completely new life and form. This method allows me to respect their 'time capsule' quality by retaining the marks of usage," she continues, emphasising the desire to rejuvenate discarded artefacts but also give them new meaning.

To respect the lives that these found objects lived before they came into her possession, Huang's process of creating the pieces for Lost Stories embraces elements such as dirty paint, scratches, glue marks and dust, she tells STIR. The first piece in the series, Cabinet I, came about after the discovery of an old blue dresser. The silhouette for the redesigned cabinet draws on the form of the original piece of wooden furniture, with the scuff markings on the interior—excess paint and fingerprints; inverted and displayed on the exterior.

The beauty of ageing in the patina that each piece in the ongoing collection displays as surface embellishment is also evident in others. For instance, the table design, with its different shades of wood, salvaged from an old chest of drawers, includes a part where someone scratched their name on the former furniture's surface, adding a droll reminder of that piece's former life, but also adding to its current one, like a memory. The chair design on the other hand, is deceptively minimal. It uses planks of varying textures and shades, but it is the holes of former nails and ridges for joints that make it look distinctive.

The product design collection, while a whimsical and poetic play on renovation projects and retrofit exercises, also contributes to and highlights principles of circular design with an emphasis on craftsmanship. Huang hopes that the collection will encourage discourse on reuse, sustainable design and showcase that circularity can go beyond industrial applications. "Ageing, as years pass, deepens my melancholy. But my life, day after day, growingly glows," notes Huang, quoting Japanese writer Kanoko Okamoto on the conceptual underpinnings of the series, of celebrating rejuvenation and a cyclical view of life and the objects that make it up.