08 · Furniture · Material

Shell.

Shell explores how discarded seafood shells can find new value in furniture design.

Inspired by London's seafood culture and traditional shell craftsmanship, I experimented with shell-based materials before developing an oak jewellery cabinet with textured shell-concrete surfaces.

Year: Sep 2023 – Jan 2024
Context: BA Product and Furniture Design, Chelsea College of Arts (UAL)
Outcome: A jewellery cabinet, made by hand to a saleable finish
Materials: Shell fragments, concrete, oak, wax oil, all sourced in London

The finished Shell cabinet on four tall wooden legs, with blue doors set with a shell-concrete tile

Localism · London furniture

What makes furniture belong to London?

Furniture making in London is squeezed by high production costs and cheap imports. I looked for a local answer: London materials, simple making and a sense of place.

A blue Oyster card lying on a London Underground map — **The Oyster card**London's travel card is named partly after the Thames oyster beds.

A gloved hand holding a perforated oyster shell found on the Thames foreshore — **The Thames**Perforated oyster shells on the foreshore show oysters were harvested here for centuries.

The blue shopfront of a fishmonger and seafood restaurant in London — **The table**Today the city's seafood restaurants and markets serve shellfish every day.

Reference images · by others

So much seafood also means shells. What if they became a resource instead of waste?

The story in three threads

A material, a tradition and a form.

Shell tied the cabinet to London in three ways, and each one shaped a different part of it.

A bin heaped with discarded scallop shells

Waste

London bins its shells

At London's markets, scallop shells leave as rubbish or fertiliser, never as a material.

A shell-covered hut in Grosvenor Gardens, London, seen through iron gates

Craft

Looking beyond the market

Shell huts, shellwork and conchology: shells once arranged, decorated and collected with care.

The cabinet with its door open, showing the shell tile, a glass shelf and an oak leg

Form

A vintage body, a new surface

The shell becomes a tile on a familiar long-legged cabinet.

The cabinet sits where the three meet: waste material, precious tradition, everyday furniture.

Waste · the material London throws away

Thread · Waste

At London's markets, shells leave as waste.

At Borough and Billingsgate I asked where the shells go. They leave with the morning's rubbish or as fertiliser, never as a material.

In London · my market visits

Black and white photos of seafood stalls and bins at Borough Market — Borough Market

Billingsgate Market before dawn, tubs of shucked scallops, and scallops in their shells on a stall — Billingsgate Market

Field notes · Billingsgate

“In the busiest morning market, a lot of rubbish is generated as traders divide and handle seafood such as fish, shrimp and scallops.”
Market Control member

The rubbish is hard to clear from the riverside site, so a waste-clearance company collects it the same day.

“Most of these seafood scraps are used as natural fertiliser in London.”
Market manager

My proposal

A loop instead of the bin.

Collect shells from vendors, cast them into tiles, build furniture, and return a share of each sale to the vendor.

The shell loop Red: where shells go today · Green: my proposal

Craft · looking at shells beyond the market

Thread · Craft

Looking at shells beyond the market.

After finding discarded shells at London's seafood markets, I began looking at how they had been used and collected. My research took me from shell-covered buildings to decorative objects and natural-history collections.

Close-up of a wall set with white shells in diamond patterns — Grosvenor Gardens, 1952 by others

Shell Huts, Grosvenor Gardens

The shell huts brought this research back to London. Their decorated walls enclosed a practical space used to store gardeners' tools.

A 19th-century floral ornament made of shells under a glass dome — 19th century by others

Shellwork

Individual shells were carefully arranged into flowers and decorative patterns. These objects interested me because of the time and craftsmanship given to a material I had encountered as waste.

Illustrated page of scallop shells from the Linnaean System of Conchology — Linnaean System of Conchology by others

Natural history and collecting

Conchology books recorded the shapes and distinguishing features of shells. They offered another way of looking at the material: as something to examine, identify and collect.

A dense grid of individually photographed shells from Anna Ridler's The Shell Record — Anna Ridler, The Shell Record, 2021 Each found shell recorded on its own: a discarded fragment treated as something worth keeping · by others

The decision

Choosing a jewellery cabinet.

The care given to shells in these references informed my choice to make a jewellery cabinet. I wanted to use discarded shells in an object made to hold things that someone values.

Silver-sprayed oyster shells holding pearls and earrings, on a glass shelf — What it holds Silver-sprayed oyster shells as jewellery dishes

Material · keeping the shell visible

Threads 01 + 03

Hard enough for furniture, and still showing the shell.

I crushed shells into fragments and tried four binders. Each card shows the sample from that test.

Binder testGelatineA thin, soft sheet that broke easily
Binder testPlasterSet fast, but too fragile, little contrast
Binder testResinCloudy, the shells lost their impact
ChosenConcreteHard, slow to set, and reads as London

Why concrete

Shell is calcium carbonate, the mineral in cement's limestone. Raw concrete is also London's own surface.The Barbican, Brutalist London

Black and white photo of the Barbican Estate's concrete walkways — The Barbican Joas Souza · by others

Concrete test tiles set with blue mussel and pale scallop shell fragments — Shell-concrete tiles Fragments rather than powder, so the shell can be seen

Form · where the shell sits on the furniture

Thread · Form

A familiar form, a distinctive surface.

Inspired by the proportions of mid-century long-legged cabinets and the use of embedded materials in furniture surfaces, I explored how shell-concrete tiles could become part of a compact oak jewellery cabinet.

Through sketches and material placement studies, the design evolved into a tall, slender cabinet combining a familiar furniture silhouette with a distinctive surface.

References

Familiar form

A vintage wooden cabinet on tall tapered legs

Long legs · Compact body

1960s cabinet reference · by others

Material as surface

Jan Hendzel cabinet with reclaimed timber pieces inlaid in the doors

Material · Inlay · Texture

Surface reference · Jan Hendzel, What Lies Beneath Cabinet ’23 · by others

A familiar cabinet form, reinterpreted through shell-concrete surfaces.

Oak carries the structure and the shell stays on the surface. Concrete is heavy and brittle, so as panels it keeps the cabinet light, and a broken tile can be replaced.

My sketches & CAD

Exploring the form

Ink and marker sketches of cabinet variations with shell panels

Initial sketches · Proportion studies

Combining materials

Marker sketch of the cabinet with blue doors holding concrete panels, tall splayed legs, and a concrete tile study

Blue doors · Shell-concrete panels

The final proportions

3D render of the cabinet on tall legs, with dimension drawings and colour studies

CAD · Dimensions · Material composition

Where each thread ends up

Every part of the cabinet answers one of the threads.

Hover over or tap the points on the photos to see what each part does and which thread it came from.

Close-up of the cabinet: concrete top, blue doors with the split shell tile, oak sides and a vintage hinge — Closed

The cabinet with its door open: a silver shell on a glass shelf inside, and one of the long oak legs — Open

Making it saleable

The first prototype looked like a student model.

After studying how cabinets are made at Aram and SCP, I rebuilt it to a sellable standard, testing each detail on sample pieces first.

Prototype

Screws, plywood, a broken tile

Exposed screws and hinges made the prototype look handmade rather than sellable. During installation a concrete tile fell and broke, so I moved to a harder concrete mix.

Body

Rebuilt in solid oak

I cut the oak into 2.5 cm boards, planed them down, then cut two 20 cm and two 24 cm lengths. The sides are glued into a box, with no screws showing.

Hinges

Tested on sample pieces

In the first test the hinge sat outside the cupboard and looked unfinished. On the final piece I fitted a more ornate, old-fashioned hinge that adds a sense of age.

Door

Magnets instead of push catches

A push catch looked out of place on a classic cabinet, and pressing it tipped the tall cabinet over. Old cabinets at the furniture market used magnets, so I did too.

Finish

Glue, sand, wax, dry

The body was glued and clamped, then sanded. Hand sanding was slow and uneven, so I switched to a sanding machine. Wax oil makes the oak waterproof and mothproof and brings out the grain.

Cutting and planing oak boards in the workshop, with hand-drawn cutting steps — PrototypeTap to enlarge