Oreka, an Upcycled Wood Rocking Stool

Oreka, an Upcycled Wood Rocking Stool — Bidart, Basque Country

Oreka was born in 2016 in Quentin Delion's workshop in Bidart, out of a personal urge rather than a precise brief. The original idea was a rocking chair. The space available at the time, a small apartment, decided otherwise. The project was rethought at a smaller scale: a rocking stool, whose Basque name means balance, keeping the chair's motion without its bulk. The seat is made of solid wood slats, carried by a metal structure that rests on two solid wood rockers, the whole assembly visually lightening the seat. The rocking motion is active, designed to accompany a seated position, whether for work or for a drink outdoors, without ever staying still.

The project was also the studio's first exercise in small limited-series production. It called for twenty identical metal structures, 60 slats to make up the seats, 40 solid wood rockers cut on the bandsaw, a controlled workshop time and a viable selling price. Without a publisher or distributor to absorb the time needed for commercial development, the entire risk of production and sales rested on one person. The reality of self-publishing, spanning idea, design, prototyping, production and distribution, is long and complex. With these unavoidable steps, selling this kind of product barely covers costs. It is this project constraint, more than the making itself, that laid the methodological groundwork (upcycled wood, craft-driven design) that Quentin Delion would later reuse on series such as ADA RACK.

The seat's slats are joined with a through dovetail. The metal legs fit into the seat through a 10 mm drilled hole, and the same diameter allows them to slot into the rockers at the other end. Nothing is screwed, the assembly holds through mechanical fitting. This solution, adopted in V2, corrects the first series: the first twenty units had a metal frame simply screwed to the seat, with no dovetail joint. The shift to traditional woodworking assembly followed a cabinetmaker's logic applied to a series object, less metal and a stronger fit.

The wood species vary depending on the offcuts available in the workshop at the time of making: oak (Quercus), plane (Platanus), ash (Fraxinus) and walnut (Juglans regia) have followed one another across the series (see also how to choose the right wood species for custom furniture) each oiled or varnished depending on the batch. Today, only oak and plane remain available, finished with oil. The metal structure is powder-coated in matte white, a finish handled by workshops based in the Basque Country, Lepoxi S.A. in Gipuzkoa or Poli-Éder in Anglet.

Producing a seat in series also revealed a problem the design phase hadn't anticipated: storage. Of the forty stools made, more than thirty found a buyer. Keeping assembled seats in stock while waiting for a buyer ties up volume that is costly per square metre on the Basque Coast, where workshop space is far from cheap. Oreka's V2 answers this with flat-pack storage, seat and rockers kept separate, assembled to order. A lesson in production as much as in design, one that still shapes how Quentin Delion approaches his limited series today.

Oreka measures 430 mm in depth, 350 mm in width and 445 mm in height. A few units remain available, at 280 euros, in the studio's Limited Editions selection.

Quentin Delion is a designer and cabinetmaker based in Bidart, in the Basque Country, specialising in custom furniture and small series made from workshop wood offcuts. Have a custom furniture or small-series project around Biarritz? Let's talk.