Furniture designer incorporates Bcomp natural fibers into luxury REI chair

From endurance motorcycle racing to luxury designer furniture, Tras, a Japan-based design and manufacturing studio, specializes in the design and production of carbon fiber and other advanced composite materials. A collaboration with sustainable lightweighting specialist Bcomp (Fribourg, Switzerland) has resulted in the development of the REI chair, a sustainable product manufactured from Bcomp’s flax-based ampliTEX technical fabrics. 

While Tras’ founding is steeped in designing bespoke carbon fiber bodywork for race cars and motorcycles, it turned a corner in 2009 with a new focus on developing unique furniture that showcased founder Masanao Nitta’s carbon fiber craftsmanship in an interesting way. Project REI began as a collaboration between Tras and Japanese designer Keita Shimizu, drawing from Japan’s rich history of work in composites, citing and paying homage to the 1,300-year-old Ashura statue. Made entirely from composites — flax fibers and urushi lacquer (a natural resin) — the statue depicts a god, stands around 1.5 meters tall and is considered to be a national treasure.

When Masanao Nitta used carbon fiber in the first REI chair design, he went through countless steps of lacquering and surface polishing. Applying this ancient technique to today’s state-of-the-art composite materials reportedly enabled Tras to achieve a unique tint that reflects the deep golden brown of natural urushi lacquer. With the statue a well-known cultural icon of Japan, the chair paying homage to it quickly garnered attention. It was even exhibited internationally, including in Switzerland during Art Basel at the VOLTA fair.

From this international attention, Nitta was made aware of more sustainable, high-performance natural fiber composites. It was not long before he was in discussions with the Bcomp team about using ampliTex to produce a new version of the REI chair that closely mirrored the Ashura statue’s original flax fiber and urushi lacquer construction.

The new, natural fiber REI is said to highlight the level of quality and craftsmanship that is possible with flax fiber reinforcement. AmpliTEX’s aesthetics are said to be well suited to the high-end design application, with the flax weave entirely visible across the bowl-shaped structure of the chair. With visual perfection and quality paramount to ensuring the chair meets the expectations of discerning customers, Tras claims that ampliTex was the ideal choice.