Deglan

DEGLAN is the Berlin-based practice of Domenic Degner and Falko Landenberger, whose sculptural furniture is defined by continuous surfaces with no discernible beginning or end. Each piece carries the trace of the duo’s collaborative process: one shapes the form, the other the surface, until the two become inseparable. Working across furniture, lighting and sculptural objects, the studio has developed a visual language that borrows the restraint of minimalism but sets aside its coolness, producing organic forms that pair architectural precision with an instinctive feel for material.

Founded in 2021, DEGLAN grew out of the pair’s shared background in architecture. What began during the renovation of their own apartment became an independent practice, driven by a mutual interest in the Gesamtkunstwerk: the interior understood as a total work of art. DEGLAN treats furniture, lighting and wall pieces not as isolated objects but as the architectural anchors of a room.

At the centre of the practice is an ongoing dialogue. Ideas pass continually between the two founders, developed through conversation and through making, to the point that individual authorship becomes difficult to trace. Each piece takes shape through negotiation – between the designers, between hand and material, between form and surface – rather than starting from a fixed image of the finished object.

DEGLAN’s forms do not depict the natural world directly. Instead, they draw on the slow forces that shape it – erosion, weathering, sedimentation, growth – abstracted into smooth, rounded silhouettes that feel recognisable without settling into a literal image. The Boulder series takes its cue from stones worn smooth by ice and water over millennia. Cloud draws on the softer, shifting quality of cloud formations, producing flowing, undulating forms from the same wood-and-plaster construction, though lighter in feeling than Boulder’s density. Eido began with a dining table whose reflective, sinewy legs were shaped after cattle wading through water.

Material shapes the outcome of a piece as much as the design does. Solid timber is carved first, then built up through successive layers of hand-applied Venetian stucco, until form and surface become a single continuous whole. Alongside stucco, DEGLAN works in cast bronze, Murano glass and timber finished using the Japanese charring technique shou sugi ban, which enhances the grain of the wood as it improves its durability. Each material is chosen partly for how it feels under hand, and partly for how it behaves under changing light, animating the object over the course of a day.

Underlying this is a broader interest in permanence, understood not only as durability, but as a capacity to be lived with. DEGLAN’s objects are made to age: to gather marks, develop patina and become embedded in the history of the interiors they inhabit, built to be repaired and inherited rather than replaced.

Since its founding in 2021, DEGLAN has exhibited internationally at Design Miami, PAD London and Salon Art + Design. The studio is represented by Charles Burnand Gallery, London, where its work has featured across exhibitions examining the relationship between contemporary craft, sculpture and collectible design.