21 August 2010

Sterling Surfaces turned around my bias against solid surface materials


Sterling Surfaces made me see solid surface in a whole new light and they did it with this chair.


Solid surface is a category name for products such as Corian, Hi-Macs, Avonite and many more. Generically, solid surface materials are made from mineral powder bonded with acrylic or polyester to form a dense and resilient material.

I met Sterling Surfaces last winter on Twitter (where else?) and they've been blowing me away on a very consistent basis. I've sat in these chairs in Grand Central Terminal on at least two separate occasions and I was amazed when I found out who made them.


You guessed it, Sterling Surfaces.

Sterling Surfaces hails from Sterling, Massachusetts but they work every where. I've seen high-quality fabricators before, but I've never seen anything like this:




After watching that video, I'm ready to start specifying some serious thermoforming.

You can find more information about solid surface, thermoforming and Sterling Surface's place in the world on their extensive website. In addition to their website, they maintain a large image library in their Flickr stream. You can find them on Facebook, YouTube and Twitter too.

These people are not only great at what they do, they get the whole social media thing and that's one more thing to like.

Sterling Surfaces' work has made me rethink an admittedly strong bias I have against solid surface. I know I'm not alone in that sentiment and I guess I get it from too many years in the trenches and seeing too many botched solid surface installations. There's no chance of that here though. Sterling Surfaces is rehabilitating an entire product category and for that they deserve an award. Actually, they get them all the time.

4 comments:

  1. Wow that first picture is fabulous. That's like a chair that I think you'd have in your sealed pod home on Mars or something. Now we just need the flying cars to go along with it.

    But seriously, it has that really great retro-futuristic look that I love :)

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  2. They're really good people too which makes me like that chair all the more. Did you see any of the other stuff in their Flickr gallery? Amazing.

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  3. Thanks for sharing, Paul. Very exciting design! I'll check out their Flickr page.

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  4. You will be amazed Mark. You will be amazed.

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