Come on, You Know You Want a Chair Made Out of a 737 Engine
THE 737 COWLINGChair wasn’t always a chair. Even now, it’s an unusual one: its exterior is welded together from sheets of titanium alloy, and when you sit in it, you’re effectively sitting inside a metal-and-leather bowl that’s like the bigger, badder cousin of Finnish designer
from 1963.
The Cowling Chair, like everything else made byFallen Furniture, used to be an airplane part. The chair’s body was once an engine cowling on a Boeing 737. Harry and Ben Tucker, brothers and design partners, bought it for £5,000 (about $7,300), refurbished it, and sold it for £19,000 ($28,000). They do this all the time, with emergency exit doors, cluster bombs, and window sections—anything that’s “not reusable” in the aviation industry, and is “essentially scrap,” as Harry Tucker puts it.
FALLEN FURNITURE
Fallen Furniture officially launched in the spring of 2012, after the Tucker brothers decided to leave the jobs that bored them (Ben worked at a property investment firm in London; Harry modeled in New York City) for something new. They never thought about going into the furniture business, but got the “off-the-cuff idea” to do so after discovering a California company that turns discarded aircraft parts into pieces of furniture. “I felt like the stuff they did was a bit brash and loud, and we wanted to create something a bit more design-led,” Harry Tucker says.
The Tuckers grew up on a dairy farm outside of Bath, in the U.K., so were generally familiar with physical labor, but not furniture or industrial design. They learned quickly. The first piece from Fallen Furniture was theExit Table, made from an emergency exit door on an Airbus A320. The Tuckers source all their airplane pieces from a partner company that dismantles one retired aircraft a week. Certain parts, like entrance doors, can be reused in working aircraft and will fetch resale prices around £20,000. The Tuckers go for the obsolete goods. All their pieces are bespoke, and one can take months to produce. The 737 Cowling Chair took six months to finish.
tEverything from Fallen Furniture is distinctly aviatory, but soon, Tucker says, they’ll be working on “products that people can buy that you wouldn’t really know comes from an aircraft.” Window panes, for example, are abundant, so the Tuckers are busy re-fashioning the material into lighting pendants. Later this spring, they’ll also launch
, a spin-off brand that upcycles aircraft textiles into travel bags. The Tuckers see these forthcoming pieces as luxury items that will come with a narrative and bemade from stalwart material. “Today there’s so much stuff that’s soulless and plain,” Tucker says. “We want something you can attach stories to and won’t throw away.”
