Collection: Benjamin Hubert
Benjamin Hubert (born 1984) is an English industrial designer and entrepreneur, founder and creative director of Layer, a London-based brand presented at the London Design Festival in September 2015. The company approaches design holistically through the interaction of different disciplines - industrial design, interface design, mechanical and electronic engineering, user experience design, interaction design, branding and human-centred research. At the base of this pragmatic method are the designer's Industrial Design and Technology studies at Loughborough University in the Midlands where he obtained his degree in 2006. Hubert believes that good design can help people be happier and healthier. This is why 20% of his employees' time is dedicated to developing non-profit projects. Among them is a charity box - designed to raise funds for Maggie's Cancer Centres - shaped like a body bowing its head, as if in a gesture of gratitude.
The constantly growing office works with international brands like Pepsi, Samsung, Nike, Braun, Bang & Olufsen, Aesop, BMW, Herman Miller, Panasonic and Fritz Hansen deploying design to create products that significantly change the way people live and work. At the same time, he pursues his own production and experimental projects. Move is a seating prototype for Airbus that uses textiles and smart functionality to improve the economy class experience during short and medium-haul flights by allowing passengers to monitor and control seat tension, temperature, pressure and movement. Benjamin Hubert's most recent projects include a series of "pandemic" accessories for the personal care brand Never Go Alone; the super-slim, sculptural Beousound Emerge speaker for Bang & Olufsen; and the Resonate LightVision meditation headset for US startup Resonate.
Hubert has collaborated with Poltrona Frau, for which, on the occasion of the brand's centenary, he designed the Juliet armchair, reinventing classic capitonné in a contemporary key. For Moroso, he created the Cradle chair collection, all in fire-retardant polyurethane foam and polyester fibre with an internal structure in wood, and the Net set of painted steel mesh tables. With Fritz Hansen, Hubert created the Basket magazine rack in veneered solid wood. For Cappellini, he designed the Garment lounge club armchair and for Ligne Roset, the Container By table lamp. He created the Hula family of aluminium stools for Andreu World; the Maritime chair in solid wood for Casamania; the Roofer line of interior suspension lamps for Fabbian, in five different shapes whose frame is finished with flakes of semi-rigid rubber material.
