London-based designer Tino Seubert builds Ferric Glass around a single premise: toughened high-iron glass paired with stainless steel spider hinges from 1990s curtain-wall facades, repurposed at domestic scale.
The starting point was a commission, not a concept. A friend asked Tino Seubert to build a TV cabinet that could conceal the screen when not in use. Working with spider hinges, the kind deployed on glazed building facades, he built a piece of furniture that used them as both fixed and movable joints, placing them throughout the structure with what he describes as extravagance. That first object disclosed more than it resolved: the hinges and glass planes, Seubert realized, could function as a modular system generating three-dimensional form through CAD exploration. Ferric Glass followed from that moment.
The glass that gives the collection its name is high-iron toughened glass, visually identifiable at its cut edges, which read deep forest green in cross-section. That tint comes from iron content in the batch, and the iron connects the glass to the hinges and to the hardware: one material element, three expressions. The production constraint is absolute. Toughened glass must have all holes drilled before tempering. Any error, a misplaced fixing, a misjudged tolerance, makes the entire sheet unusable. There is no repair. The piece is remade from the beginning.
The table lamp in the photographs is a hexagonal assembly of high-iron panels joined with four-arm spider hinges and coil spring connectors. In the studio shot, an internal light source illuminates the frosted upper panels while the lower hardware throws a shadow pattern across a pale grey ground, a corona of radiating hinge-arm shapes projected outward. The bowl is four curved triangular panels meeting at a diamond point, each junction managed by the same hardware system.
Seubert has introduced other materials over the course of the collection. Travertine and onyx replaced glass in some bowls; smoked glass and gold-plated hinges extended the palette. These expansions tested the internal logic of the system against new material registers, and the most recent work returns to the original premise of industrial glass and stainless steel. The sideboard is the clearest version of that return: form and engineering inseparable, the design decisions and the structural decisions the same decision.
Seubert's earlier practice involved wicker and anodised aluminium furniture, shown at the Hepworth Wakefield in 2018. That work made similar arguments about the relationship between organic materials and industrial components. Ferric Glass tightens the proposition considerably: there is no organic material here, only degrees of industrial process, from the curtain-wall hinge to the pre-drilled toughened sheet.
