EINDHOVEN – Like a weed, veneer invades today’s blossoming furniture industry. Although everyone hates its presence, it continues to thrive. Bart Joachim van Uden knows that the mass-produced staple isn’t going away anytime soon. He treats veneer as a diamond in the rough. The Dutch designer and DAE graduate peeled away the humdrum wooden covering and replaced it with metamorphicrock in his project Marble Earth. Van Uden took a free trip around the world via Google Earth and gathered a virtual collection of rocky landscapes from faraway places. Without reinventing the wheel, he clad chipboard cupboards with printed images of aerial views ‘selected to look like exclusive natural stone’. The surfaces of these pieces resemble marble veining. The project shows how designers can evoke the impression of something remote and unseen by assigning a new purpose to what’s already out there.
