Droog

ドローホ / 1990s– / Style / Furniture and Interiors

Droog is the shared manner of a Dutch designers' cooperative that formed in the 1990s, and droog is the Dutch word for dry. Familiar things, a salvaged drawer or a knot, are kept as the structure of the object instead of being hidden by finishing. The group made simplicity and wit into a common type, which set it against the slicker industrial design of the same years.

Droog — Marcel Wanders, Knotted Chair, 1996 — Wikimedia Commons / CC BY 4.0 · © Sandra Fauconnier
Marcel Wanders, Knotted Chair, 1996 — Wikimedia Commons / CC BY 4.0 · CC BY 4.0 · © Sandra Fauconnier
Droog — Tejo Remy, You Can't Lay Down Your Memory, 1991 — Wikimedia Commons / CC BY 2.0 · © Sheila Thomson
Tejo Remy, You Can't Lay Down Your Memory, 1991 — Wikimedia Commons / CC BY 2.0 · CC BY 2.0 · © Sheila Thomson
Droog — Rody Graumans, 85 Lamps, 1993 — Wikimedia Commons / CC BY-SA 2.0 · © Régine Debatty (we-make-money-not-art)
Rody Graumans, 85 Lamps, 1993 — Wikimedia Commons / CC BY-SA 2.0 · CC BY-SA 2.0 · © Régine Debatty (we-make-money-not-art)

At a glance

Visual cues

  • Ready made parts of different origins are bound into one piece without matching their colour or wear
  • Straps and cords that look like temporary fixings stay on as the final structure
  • The making process remains on the finished surface, with knots and joints left unsanded
  • Because the parts differ every time, no two objects from one design are alike

Best used for

  • When found parts or salvage should be shown as the structure rather than covered up
  • When one object needs exactly one idea that has to be explained, and nothing decorative anywhere else

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Dictionary entry

Type
Keep lettering off the object. Where an explanation is needed, give it one short title and set it in a single plain sans serif.
Composition
One idea per object. Add nothing, and let the salvaged parts keep their mismatched dimensions.
Material
Combine materials of different origins: discarded drawers, cord and strapping, fibre soaked in resin. Leave the traces of making unpolished and let the fixings serve as the finish.
Caution
Reproduce only the look of salvage in new material and the origin, which is the point, drops out, leaving a weathered decorative finish.
Further study
the phrase simplicity and wit in Cooper Hewitt's Knotted Chair commentary, and the procedure that reread macramé as a new material / how Tejo Remy's chest of drawers in the V&A (O175596) entered Droog's first collection two years later / Marcel Wanders' Knotted Chair shown in 1996 and taken up by Cappellini the following year

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