One of the ways this shows is through Kobayashi’s experimentation with paint and colour. One of the most obvious examples of this is in his Mikado furniture series, based on the Hungarian children's toy. These incorporate simple geometric coloured stripes and tapered members to create a style reminiscent of the ‘pick up stick’ toys. The result are playful pieces of furniture that look almost as though they have been stuck together by a child.

Kobayashi then peels this back by removing the colours in his ‘Mikado Bench Monochrome’ to create a much more understated and elegant piece. The quality of the craftsmanship of these works are what, for me, make Kobayashi’s work so special. The seamless execution of complex angles and joinery allows pieces made from simple geometric shapes to really shine.

There are examples of this throughout his work. ‘Wiggle Shoji Screen’, ‘hOOk’ and ‘Furikake Lantern’ are all pieces which use simple geometric shapes within their woodwork, but come together extremely elegantly due to the quality of the joinery. When working with such simple shapes, mistakes are plain to see and so for the design to work, to look ‘tight’, the quality of the material working has to be spot on.

However there are a few examples of Kobayashi’s work that aren’t quite as simple in their design. My favourite of these is ‘Bat Shelf’, a sculptural piece created from the disassembled components of an old stool that had been sitting in a friend’s attic. This reimagining and recycling of an old piece of furniture is something that I think is really special, especially in the way the design features of the original stool are carried through into the shelf, however most of all I think it shows off Kobayashi’s skill at composition. To take the component pieces of an already crafted piece of furniture and successfully turn them into something that feels so coherent, perhaps even improved, is truly impressive.

I think I’m so drawn to Kobayashi’s work because in my ideal world it’s exactly what I want to do myself. I’d love to work with wood and create my own handmade pieces (see my last blog, Woodworking,YouTube and Pedulla Studio), however I think it’s quite easy within this work to become purely a ‘furniture maker’ where you end up making similar pieces over and over and I think I see this repetition in quite a lot of the makers I follow who may not class themselves as ‘designers’. Whilst Kobayashi still makes furniture, he also allows himself the freedom to branch out into other aspects of design and work with a multitude of other designers on projects adjacent to this more traditional furniture crafting.

One thing I’m really struggling at the moment with is how feasible something like this is for me. Kobayashi originally trained as a cabinet maker for 3 years in Austria and while I’ll most likely have a master’s degree to my name in a year's time this lacks a lot of the more physical skills one needs to actually start a career in making. That’s why even if it’s just as a hobby, I want to take more advantage of the workshop facilities available to me at the Glasgow School of Art. It may not ever be a career, but at the very least I still want to make work of my own.

I would massively recommend checking out the rest of Kobayashi's work, easily found here on his Website. In fact, in researching this blog I’ve actually found out that Kobayashi is based extremely near me in London. I might even send an email and see if there’s any chance of us working together…