Useful Totem, rediscovering the value of glass, wood and cork
Useful Totem, rediscovering the value of glass, wood and cork
Useful Totem is a collection of functional sculptures designed by Alexie Sommer, co-founder and creative director at URGE Collective, London, and Quentin Delion, cabinetmaker and designer in Bidart, Basque Country. The collection launches at the Material Matters fair during the London Design Festival, from 15 to 17 September 2026.
A domestic gesture, with a deeper question
The project started in Alexie's kitchen, looking for a way to store leftovers without clingfilm. Behind that practical question lay a broader one. Her design research convinced her that creators need to better understand the carbon footprint of their materials, make more imaginative choices, and consider an object's end of life from the beginning of the design process rather than as an afterthought. Vintage glassware costs almost nothing at a flea market, wood offcuts pile up in workshops, recycled cork is a widely available resource, even in the form of second-hand insulation panels. Three materials treated as worthless, only waiting for a use to reclaim their value.
Stacking to make sense
The principle is simple in theory, yet more demanding in practice: stack vintage glass, turned wood and recycled cork into totems, columns that hold themselves up by their fit alone, with no fixings. Once assembled, they form a sculptural installation; taken apart, they become tableware again, bowls, dishes, cups, glasses, each with its own cork lid to keep leftovers without plastic.
The starting point was never the drawing, but a found object. Alexie sourced the vintage glassware for the project on Le Bon Coin, on Selency, and in flea markets across the Basque Country: Duralex bowls, Arcoroc dishes, Vereco plates, chosen for their colour, deep amber, cobalt blue, true green, smoke, and for the tempering that has kept them solid through decades of domestic use. This existing material dictated everything that followed. Quentin worked the wood and cork forms meant to answer each piece of glass, seeking the match of volume and style in parallel. The process blended classic formal research with digital tools: 3D-printed templates allowed curves and fittings to be tested quickly before being cut into the final material, a method that speeds up trial and prototyping. Each form was adjusted until the wood held the glass with no play and no strain, a balance that can't be entirely worked out on screen.
Cooked oak, ash, wild cherry, plane
The wood comes from offcuts at Quentin's Bidart workshop, species chosen from what was on hand rather than ordered for the occasion. The oak in the "Smoky Thomas" totem, offcuts from the DUNES project for the city of Biarritz, was baked in an oven at 180 degrees for an hour and a half before being finished with oil, a heat treatment that darkens and stabilises the grain to match the smoked tone of the glass. Ash makes up the "Amber Aurelie" totem, wild cherry the "Jacqueline Green" totem, plane serves the cups and smaller pieces of the "Multi Martha" mini totem. The recycled cork is produced by Agglolux in Soustons, in the Landes, a family business founded in 1929 that turns used wine corks, collected through a network of associations, into sheets and discs cut to size for every joint.
"The vintage glass was the starting point for everything," says Quentin. "I searched for the forms and the woods from the pieces we'd found, working in parallel with 3D-printed cork models to match the volumes. It was also a chance to bring object design together with wood turning, a craft in its own right, using different techniques and different species depending on what was on hand at the workshop."
Four totems, a one-off series
From this method come four complete totems, shown in London and detailed with their dimensions and prices in the limited editions: Beatrice Blue, in blue Duralex bowls on a pale oak base, Amber Aurelie, in amber glass on ash, Jacqueline Green, seven green Vereco plates punctuating wild cherry bowls, and Smoky Thomas, seven warm grey ARC smoked bowls on cooked oak. A mini totem, Multi Martha, joins them, mixing coffee cups, mugs and glasses in all four tones, produced in a small series.
Every large totem is a one-off, but the rarity isn't down to the glassware itself, which could turn up again identically at a flea market: it comes from the turning, shaped by hand for each bowl or plate, which makes every wood and cork form singular. For the Multi Martha mini totem, it's the reverse: coffee cups, mugs and glasses vary, but the wood and cork stay identical from piece to piece, cut from the same digital files, which makes this part of the collection reproducible in a small series through CAM.
The story of a collaboration
The project ran over a full year, from the first research in March 2025 to the totem photography in late June 2026, with no commission and no outside funding, on time borrowed from paid work. The shoot took place at Villa Fal in Biarritz, a coworking space dedicated to fashion and design, under the lens of Ignacio Barrios. The challenge wasn't the collaboration itself, easy and enjoyable throughout, but the need to build the totems almost one at a time, with the occasional loss that working with old material can bring.
What the two designers take from the experience above all is a clearer sense of their own relationship to making. Designing alongside another creator, from idea to material, bringing technical, aesthetic and logistical expertise, proved more engaging than repeating the same piece over and over. A useful line to draw around Quentin's studio: a source of proposals and design work alongside designers and architects, rather than simply an executor of someone else's brief.
Giving back value to what considered lost
The project runs against the grain of the design industry used to endlessly new collections. Making a new object from virgin material carries a carbon cost that few designers make visible; Useful Totem flips the question around, what can be made desirable from what already exists, rather than from what would need to be extracted.
Useful Totem shows that a collectibles can be made from three materials treated as worthless, without producing anything new for the occasion. That logic opens several paths the two designers haven't ruled out: making the digital files for the wood and cork pieces available open source, so anyone could have them machined near home rather than shipping a finished object. A way to multiply the gesture of revaluing materials without multiplying the transport, in keeping with the project's low-carbon, circular spirit. It also invites a look beyond the workshop, toward the offcuts and waste other businesses produce, dormant material that could feed tomorrow's high-value objects instead of ending up in the bin.
Useful Totem is designed by Alexie Sommer, URGE Collective, and Quentin Delion, Studio Delion. Photography by Ignacio Barrios, food styling by Frida Wallin, recycled cork supplied by Agglolux in the Landes. The full technical file for the collection, with detailed dimensions and compositions, is available to download.
Quentin Delion is a designer and cabinetmaker based in Bidart, in the Basque Country. He works alongside designers, architects and brands on custom furniture and object projects, from form research to fabrication. Let's talk.
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