Gold Furniture Design · 2025
Zense Table Chair Set
- A' Design Award 2025 Gold Winner in Furniture Design
- Awarded April 15, 2025
- CLIENT: Iterative Studio
- Estimated Number of Design Views: 1,748,741
- Verification code 1CF919EBE5 · Verify this award
About Zense Table Chair Set
Zense is a transformative table that merges traditional Chinese craftsmanship with contemporary functionality. Its design takes the process of transformation into a ritualistic act, engaging the user's all 5 senses to seamlessly shift between calligraphy surface and tea ceremony platform. The piece is hand-crafted, pursuing unprecedented wood thinness through masterful artisan techniques, relying on traditional wooden joinery techniques alone, without any metal components.
Louis Wai Yin Hung's Zense Table Chair Set emerges from a distinguished lineage of furniture design that honors both Eastern philosophical traditions and Western modernist principles, creating an ensemble that transcends mere utility to embody contemplative spatial experience. The work demonstrates sophisticated understanding of proportion and scale, the elongated table establishing horizontal emphasis while vertical slatted screens introduce rhythmic counterpoint that prevents visual monotony. Technical accomplishment reveals itself through the precision of joinery where structural members intersect without visible hardware, celebrating the wood's capacity to create stable forms through interlocking geometry rather than mechanical fastening. The designer appears to engage deeply with the phenomenology of gathering, the table's generous surface and flanking benches inviting communal ritual while the transparent screens suggest boundaries that define without confining. Material selection speaks to refined sensibility—the warm timber likely selected for both its working properties and visual character, while gray textile cushions soften the geometric rigor with domestic comfort. The inclusion of traditional tea service atop the composition may reference centuries of ceremony surrounding beverage preparation and consumption, positioning this contemporary work within ongoing cultural conversations about mindfulness, presence, and shared experience. One observes how the slatted elements filter and modulate visual connection, creating semi-private zones within open space, perhaps suggesting the Japanese concept of ma—meaningful emptiness that activates spatial potential. The ensemble rewards extended contemplation, inviting viewers to consider how furniture shapes human interaction, how material choices communicate values, and how design might cultivate states of focused attention in increasingly fragmented contemporary experience.
Press Kit
- Unique Properties
- Zense is both a furniture to ritual instrument. Its transforming structure—crafted from impossibly slender wood members—orchestrates tea ceremony and calligraphy while inscribing cultural memory into space. Every operational motion (wood sliding, joinery clicking) becomes ceremonial act of all 5 senses from touch, to sound; every use converts rooms into heritage vessels. The exoskeleton's artisanal precision enforces ritual deliberation, making tradition tactile through:
- Dimensions & Packaging
- 1300mm x 550mm x 720mm. Fully handcrafted with (screwless) traditional wooden joinery techniques. Weight distribution of structures optimised to minimise profile of structural members into 30mmx30mm solid wood.
- Tags
- Handcrafted, table, chair, set, upcycled, wood, traditional, joinery, asian, culture
- Production Technology
- Handcrafted by master artisans using traditional Chinese joinery, the furniture set is composed of 553 upcycled timber components, each meticulously shaped to optimize weight distribution—resulting in a slender yet perfectly balanced structure. Analog iterations refined proportions without digital intervention, ensuring harmony between form and function. Magnets were discreetly chiseled into wooden housings, as the assembly relies entirely on wood-on-wood joinery, eliminating metal fasteners. Even its construction embodies ritual, merging vernacular craftsmanship with intentional, meditative precision.
- Design Challenge
- This project faced the dual challenge of reviving ancient Chinese joinery while pushing wood’s structural limits to unprecedented thinness—all without modern engineering aids. nternally, we grappled with fading craftsmanship traditions. Material constraints demanded upcycled wood with unpredictable grain behavior, while the absence of metal fasteners required perfect joinery precision. Production hinged on master artisans capable of such handwork that relied on sensory intuition alone.
- Project Duration
- The project started in 2018 and was exhibited most notably DesignInspire 2019 and SUPERDESIGN SHOW (Superstudio Pi - Via Tortona 27 - Milan) in 2022, amongst other venues in Hong Kong and China across 2022-2025.
- Operation Flow
- Zense begins as a serene writing surface, but with a simple lift, its wooden top rises and locks into place, transforming into a tea ceremony platform. There are no buttons or complicated mechanisms; just smooth, deliberate motions that mirror the care of traditional rituals themselves. This motion forces mindfulness, and addresses all 5 sense of the body. Every interaction—the weight of the moving parts, the satisfying click of alignment is designed to make the past feel present and purposeful.
- Research
- This project pursued the minimal threshold dimensions of wooden members while retaining structural integrity, guided solely by craftsmen who discern strength through fingertips. Each slender element was refined not by engineering calculations, but through generations of tactile material intelligence. Practitioners tested these components, their ceremonial movements revealing where rigidity needed to yield to grace.
- Inspiration
- Zense transforms Asian heritage into lived experience. This kinetic table merges tea ceremony and calligraphy through masterful woodcraft—its slender exoskeleton achieving structural elegance while enforcing ritual deliberation. Every interaction engages the senses, making tradition tactile rather than symbolic. Through material intelligence and embodied use, Zense bridges past and future, turning cultural memory into tangible, sensory encounters.
Colors of Zense Table Chair Set
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Multidisciplinary Design Services with Cultural Heritage Focus
We transform cultural narratives into extraordinary spatial experiences across architecture, interiors, furniture and product design. Our award-winning Hong Kong studio bridges tradition with innovation, crafting meaningful environments that honor heritage while embracing contemporary functionality.
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