When encountering the stocky works of New York– and Paris-based designer Rich Aybar, you might not immediately realize that his translucent, honey-hued furniture is made from rubber. Aybar’s interest in the material grew out of his work as a fashion consultant for Rick Owens. The job came with a yearly trip to Milan’s Salone del Mobile, where he realized that aside from Gaetano Pesce, few people were using rubber in furniture. “I was curious about its lack of presence,” says Aybar. While living in Berlin, a city full of rubber in its nightlife scene, he was surprised by how difficult it was to acquire for his own designs.

Because rubber was largely uncharted territory in design, Aybar had to do a lot of legwork to find fabricators and bring his collection to life. “Nobody had an idea of what I wanted to do and work with,” he says. But by working backward and following the material, he tapped into the industries that actually did use it. His search started with the Los Angeles film industry and then took him to a big fabrication house that works with Florida’s Disney World. At nearly 400 pounds per chair, the work isn’t exactly easy to transport. But the benefit of working with rubber is its resiliency—most of his work won’t need a “fragile” stamp.

For Aybar, the distance between his own ideation and outside production was frustrating. “I couldn’t see how a mold was put together or be there to make a last-minute decision,” he says. The designer is currently focusing on things he can make in his Manhattan studio, where he’s been constructing urns on a more intimate scale, as well as a rotating chandelier inspired by a trip to Murano. Unlike the glass chandeliers he saw on that trip, though, rubber offers durability: “Can this fall? Yes. Will it break? No. Does it look delicate and sweet and does it give you that sense—or fragility and poetry? Yes, it can.”

You can learn more about Rich Aybar by visiting the studio’s Instagram.

Top image by Adrianna Glaviano

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