Material Play

James Torble has always been a maker. “My mum was a nurse, and growing up she worked on Saturdays, so I’d make things for her for when she got home,” he tells me, identifying his early materials as cardboard and paint. As a teenager, his grandfather, a farrier, taught him forge work, while there was also a garage-based stint practicing woodwork with his dad. “Sometimes people quit a career and go on to do a creative thing, but I've never not made things. It's like an addiction, I have to have made something every day – have to have something to show – otherwise I'm really antsy.”

This desire to always be creating initially put James on a fine art course at Central Saint Martins. “Painting was what I did first, then I convinced myself I was more clever than I actually was and was going to be a ground-breaking philosopher-cum-conceptual artist,” he says, entertained by the memory. After college he established an art practice concerned with collapsing forms (“It was sculpture, but the objects had a level of autonomy”), before a shift in his domestic life in his mid-twenties facilitated a new trajectory: James and his partner acquired an oil rig lifeboat, converting it into a houseboat for full time living. James made the kitchen and all the furniture, which subsequently developed into a furniture company he called Loose Fit.“We wanted it to be a bit of an oxymoron,” he offers of the moniker’s nod to self-deprecation. “There's humour in the name, but the joints are actually really tight.” A collaborative venture to begin with, in 2018 James partnered with a friend who was then making cabinets; a year and a half in they left to pursue a career in music, and today, James, who is based in Hastings, oversees the operation solo from his studio in Bexhill.

Working with British grown wood, aesthetically he leans into the light-hearted, with motifs like waves and zig zags a core feature of the work. Loose Fit’s Sawtooth pieces, for example, boast spiky lines that riff on the geometric, while the Refectory table’s ‘wiggly feet’, a modern take on a traditional farmhouse style, recall the figure of a comb; the Wavy alpine stick chair, with its freehand backrest, has an echo of The Flintstones.

“You live with furniture, so I want to make things that are fun to live with,” asserts James, highlighting the tone of his practice, and the characteristics he hopes to impart on a space. “I don't want things to look too precious, even though they are precious pieces of furniture, I want people to see them as fun objects.” Seven years in, he acknowledges that time has enabled him to impose this perspective on the product. “At the start I was perhaps too concerned with proving I had the technique; the furniture I made was sort of cleaner looking. As I’ve become more comfortable, I’ve been bolder, playing with form and silhouette.”

His designs are largely a product of what he calls “playful experimentation”, messing around and sketching out loose forms, with happy accidents like the butterfly cut-out, seen on the Wavy alpine stick chair, all a part of the process (“I thought it was kind of playful and sweet, so I went with it. Some people don’t see the butterfly, but it's nice it’s there.”). Meanwhile outside inspiration arrives via his bookshelf and immediate surroundings. “I look at the local and vernacular furniture in junk shops and old pubs, and I also have a load of books on Aztec and Inca monuments, and architecture and sculpture. I go to life drawing every week, and I try to draw something every day,” explains James. “You sort of pick up those more natural forms – even though the furniture isn't based on human form. But I find shapes I like and refine them, trying to avoid too much symmetry.”

While reading the timber is wholly important – “it will tell you if it doesn’t like something” – people are ultimately the nucleus of the wider project, informing what Loose Fit does and how it works. “I've always got people in mind,” concurs James. “Obviously furniture holds the body, it's got an intimacy to it, and there's an intimacy in play I like as well. Particularly since having a baby and playing with him, you see how those two things are really interconnected.”

Toward the end of our conversation, which occurs over Zoom late in the afternoon, James highlights a personal project that further underscores this intimacy; advocating for furniture as a vehicle for affection. “I have this tradition, if friends are having a baby, I make them a little stool,” he says, holding his latest model up to the camera for me to take a look. “I've made four so far, and one for my own son. It’s just a nice thing, and the idea is that, when they’re a toddler, they can start creating while sitting on it, too.”