HWB300 is a minimalist bench collection created by Eindhoven-based designer Martin Laforêt for Carpenters Workshop Gallery. Laforêt’s ‘The Mould Objects’ collection emerges from this fertile ambiguity, where the French designer treats industrial materials as if discovering them for the first time. “The interplay between the inverse mould and positive form lends a poetry to the industrial construction materials I use,” he explains, articulating a philosophy that finds beauty in the tension between opposing forces. Here, aluminum meets concrete not as adversaries but as collaborators, with wooden shuttering and steel rebars joining this material conversation that speaks simultaneously of building sites and gallery spaces.

This approach echoes the Brutalist movement’s romance with raw concrete, yet Laforêt’s work operates on a more intimate scale. Where Le Corbusier’s béton brut commanded monumental presence, these objects invite tactile engagement, their surfaces bearing the honest marks of their making. The designer’s background – raised in Paris but now working in the Netherlands – positions him at the crossroads of French design sophistication and Dutch material innovation, a geographic tension that manifests in his work’s refined roughness.

The genius of ‘The Mould Objects’ lies in their deliberate confusion of origin stories. Each piece maintains what Laforêt calls an “ambiguous” relationship to its source, making it “difficult to discern if these blocks have been either made for the objects or have been collected on a building site.” This intentional uncertainty challenges our assumptions about material hierarchy, suggesting that beauty emerges not from precious substances but from intelligent manipulation of the everyday.