Gregor Jenkin

Great designers, producing beautiful furniture, which is collated for Australian interior designers.

Designer / Maker - Gregor Jenkin
Cape Town, South Africa
Furniture featured - Round Turned Leg Table, tables collection

Gregor Jenkin is one of South Africa’s foremost designers. A self-proclaimed ‘maker of things’. The Gregor Jenkin Studio (Woodstock, Cape Town, South Africa) is interested, not in producing design or art, but rather in the physical act of creation and manufacture. Design is a by-product of this age-old process: a natural consequence of the Studio’s attempt to find the best way of doing something.

You’ve often said you’re a maker, not a designer, what does that mean to you?

“It’s an hours-in-the-day synopsis. I spend most of my time making things and while I’m doing that I’m designing. The two happen concurrently, but when I finish making something I consider it made as opposed to designed because making is such a large part of my process. Making things is a real-time, solutions-based way to live your life, when you put your hand to something, you get results.”

Gregor works hands-on, using, aluminium, plywood, valchromat, ceramics, cast iron, brass and his preferred medium, steel, creating pared-back pieces that are an exercise in precision engineering with an air of refinement.

Design ethos

The Gregor Jenkin Studio functions as an engineering environment. Each piece is a result of a search for a new way of doing something old. In this way, Jenkin and his small team strive to create functional objects that are once thoughtful and thought-provoking.

“ Gregor’s passion for material exploration is obvious and the quest to find new manufacturing methods is an ongoing one. He explains how, with low tech behind him, he designs componentry and shops it out. He immerses himself in the process and his end products are “dramatic and sombre’’ he says, that in blue-black, a non-distracting colour to which he’s become very aligned as it “reads very nicely in silhouette” and places surrounding pieces on a level playing field. “