/// THE MAKING OF TITANS TOAST (Pt 1) ///

I was recently commissioned to design and make my most ambitious work to date, Titans Toast. It is a collection of five unique presentations for champagne bottles to be displayed at a very high end champagne lounge, as part of a redevelopment of

The client said they were taken with my Merchants Marks collection, as well as liking the texture and contrast I have running through my designs. So this was my starting point - that and I had strict sizing limitations as the pieces would be shown in a glass cabinet.

I’ll be honest, this was way out of my wheel house and I don’t drink champagne let alone frequent luxury establishments. So I did what I always do when I don’t know what to do - play around with sketches and hope that something starts to appear. Initially they mentioned the industrial heritage of the location, as well as the local river so I used those as inspiration, but this was then changed so those very first sketches were scrapped. I’m always happy looking at industrial inspiration so it was not time wasted.

Then I set about using geometric shapes, playing with scale and balance. I designed five different pieces and awaited the feedback. The client told me what they did and didn’t like about these designs so I could make informed changes for the next draft.

Around this time I met up with a friend and told her about the project, showing her my designs. I should point out that when I was at uni my tutor commented that I would “over egg the pudding by adding too much because I wasn’t confident in my designs”, and my friend made a similar comment about my sketches. She reminded me of my work, how it was a simplified version of these sketches, and how that would work better. She was right. In my lack of confidence of having no clue about how to create displays for champagne bottles I had reverted back to my old thing of giving it too much, thinking it needed more rather than being confident in my minimal aesthetic.

After a few more drafts and tweaks we agreed on the design and it was time to get making. I wanted the pieces to look nice and thick, but to make them with half inch thick metal would be impractical and incredibly costly so I contracted a “spinner” to make them for me. Warren Martin is a metal spinner which means he uses a lathe and large hand tools to pull the metal over nylon chucks, pulling the metal into the form required. For this project this meant a series of large discs in both brass and copper, with a turned over edge to give the impression they were that thick.

Meanwhile I was playing around with proportions, using silver and gold cardboard to get these spot on before moving onto the metal. This took many attempts and is far more time consuming that you’d think but it’s always better to get it perfect at this stage where cardboard is cheap, fast and easy to use rather than moving to metal too early and wasting lots of costly material.