British designer Tom Dixon is releasing a series of furniture made from cork that has been charred to give it a rich, deep brown colour reminiscent of rosewood.
The Cork collection features a shelf, stool and three tables, with chubby, rounded silhouettes that are designed to let the material shine.
"When I was growing up we had cork floors and they had this amazing warmth and tactility," Dixon told Dezeen.
"It's also sound absorbent, fireproof, water resistant and lighter than water, which is why it floats, so it's easy to transport. In terms of a dream material, you couldn't really get a lot better."

The raw material itself is derived from the outer bark of the quercus suber tree, commonly known as the cork oak. Today, the majority of it is used for the production of bottle stops, which are punched out of sheets of the bark. For the Cork collection, the remaining, pre-consumer waste material from this process was granulated and compressed into composite blocks.
At this stage the material was also charred, "a bit like popcorn" so it browns and expands. This means the final pieces are less susceptible to dirt, while also steering clear of an overly Scandinavian aesthetic.

The material was mixed with a small amount of polyurethane resin to bind it at a ratio of 93 per cent cork to seven per cent resin.
"We experimented with using no filler at all when we trialled the furniture in our restaurant in Milan, but people would pick out the gra...