In Cork City, Trestle stages settle, a temporary public interior of furniture pieces drawn from Irish vernacular furniture, recast to host gatherings across a programme of events.
settle is a temporary installation designed and staged by Trestle and captured by Willem Pab, conceived as a new public interior for gathering and collective experience in the contemporary city. It ran in Cork City from 29 July to 8 August 2026 and received an Arts Council project award in 2026. Rather than a fixed room, it works as an infrastructure of considered objects, one that can be recast and reformatted to host different events, what Trestle calls “an extended invitation to the city”.
The reference is Irish vernacular furniture, the furnishings of rural domestic interiors born of harsh economic realities. These were functional and adaptable objects, rarely used for a single purpose. Falling tables were hinged to adjacent walls and dropped away when not needed. Dressers were set to divide a space. Settle beds served in turn as storage, as sleeping places and as seating, moved and reassigned as the day required.
Trestle pulls two writers into the project. Seamus Heaney described the settle bed as “Upright, rudimentary, unshiftably planked”, a line the studio takes almost as a specification. JM Synge, writing of the same rural objects, observed that they “seem to exist as a natural link between the people and the world that is about them”. Both point to furniture that is less decoration than a way of ordering daily life.
Across the run, four events tested how far the pieces could be moved and rearranged. There was a public lecture by Patrick Lynch, a session with fuinneamh workshop, a shared reading with Jennie Moran, and a talk by Eoghan Daltun on rewilding and nature restoration. Each gathering pulled the objects into a different configuration, so that the same set of tables, dressers and beds became a lecture hall one evening and a reading room the next.
What holds it together is spatial order, threshold, repetition and variation, generated not by walls but by a moveable arrangement of objects and gestures. When the run closed the work did not disappear; settle is relocating to a new interior, its parts ready to be assembled again. It argues that civic space can be made from furniture, and that a public room can be something you carry in and set down rather than something you build.
