Rory Gilmore, Barbican Bedsides (STUDENT 2025)

Student:

Tertiary, Waters & Acland, UK

Name of school or tertiary institution, name of woodworking teacher (if you have one), and name of photographer:

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/EKLU6wTKKKw

Country

United Kingdom (Great Britain)

The Barbican Side Tables are a personal tribute to London’s iconic Barbican Centre, a place I passed every day for the last three years while summoning the courage to leave my corporate job and pursue woodworking full time. The building’s bold Brutalist forms became a daily source of inspiration, and this project is my love letter to it, and an exploration of how architecture can shape contemporary furniture design. The brief was straightforward: create a piece of hardwood furniture that contains a dovetailed drawer.
 Crafted from native ash and European oak, the two tables were designed to mirror one another, positioned on either side of a bed to give the illusion of “wrapping” around it. A continuous curve flows across both tables, leading into sculpted drawer fronts that reference the Barbican’s tiered balconies. The fronts are joined with hand-cut, half-blind dovetails, while the piston-fit drawers ensure both precision and tactile satisfaction. Cylindrical legs meet the frame with housing joints and are hand-textured at both ends—this detail feels personal, to honour those who textured the Barbican’s concrete entirely by hand (!) It’s a connection to the craftsmanship that inspired this project.
 The piece merges modern woodworking techniques with traditional hand-tool craftsmanship, embracing the Brutalist principles of honest materiality and structural clarity. Bold geometry, shifting shadows, and subtle detailing invite interaction, making this, I hope, a simply complex piece of contemporary furniture—one that reflects both my love for the Barbican and my journey into woodworking.

Images have been resized for web display, which may cause some loss of image quality. Note: Original high-resolution images are used for judging.