RIP the shiny fitted kitchen. Goodbye wonky cupboard doors, farewell dodgy chrome fittings. Uncommon Projects is a design company that is changing what we expect from a kitchen – with modernist-inspired designs and lots of plywood.
“Plywood is an honest material,” says Alan Drumm. He’s sitting beside his business partner, James Hoy, in his own kitchen, a pleasing L-shaped design with sliding cork doors, each cupboard opening via a discreet recessed handle. Before they set up the company five years ago, Drumm was working as an architect on huge commissions (he says his last project, a private hospital, “stripped years off my life”), and Hoy was at a design company making tiny cereal packet toys. Both were “masters of detail”.
Today, their bespoke plywood furniture (projects start around £8,000) is so in demand that they have a full team, with commissions usually coming from Instagram and Pinterest. They are currently working on a Maggie’s Centre in Oldham, and have been shortlisted for the Designer Kitchen & Bathroom awards.
But for Drumm and Hoy, it’s all about the material. “Plywood has a rich history in design,” Drumm says, reaching for a heavy Le Corbusier catalogue. They lean in, silent for a moment over the Unité d’Habitation: “The first manifestation of an environment suited to modern life”. “Eames made plywood splints in the Second World War – you can see a direct line then, to their classic chairs, and plywood’s use as a 60s building material,” Drumm says.
Plywood is made up of thin strips of wood laid in alternating directions and bonded with glue into sheets. Because of this construction method, it’s less susceptible to expansion and shrinkage, and remains an enduring (and relatively cheap) material. “You can join it in ways you can’t do with chipboard, you don’t need any little bits of metal, and it never deforms, never warps,” says Hoy. “It’s functional first, beautiful second.”
Though their kitchens are not cheap, they’re confident that they are the best-value bespoke kitchens you can buy. “I’d put money on it,” says Drumm. “And as people are increasingly having to make smaller spaces work, it becomes a really sound long-term investment. Especially when you get to an age when you’re growing out of Ikea.” Most of us have suffered the irritation of a door falling off, or having to buy an expensive fridge to fit into a modular design. And all-white kitchens that rarely remain so.
There’s something playful, too, about an Uncommon Project – muted primary colours, pieces slotted together like pleasing jigsaw pieces. “We like to push boundaries, but we try not to lead the client astray,” they say. Kitchen commissions led to living rooms, to offices, bedrooms, a shop, each project continuing their modernist aesthetic, their passion for plywood. “But really,” adds Hoy, “All we are is a set of details.”
