People / James Stephenson
James Stephenson is a Newcastle-based designer and maker who first found his love of making through shaping his own surfboards in his dad's shed. After studying Furniture and Product Design at Northumbria University, he took a full-time role in product development for bespoke luxury furniture — a reality that, alongside financial constraints, profoundly shaped both the limits and the direction of his own design practice. He later co-founded AfterGraft — a multidisciplinary studio housed in a repurposed Art Deco school in Newcastle upon Tyne. Everything the studio does is funded through day jobs and sustained by donated tools and materials.
Limitations Stool
My limited access to materials is the root
of most other limitations I navigate. Working full-time to keep the studio afloat leaves little time or money for my own practice – and no budget for storing or processing rough-sawn timber. The brief permitted me to use it as a method instead.
The stool is made from nine ash offcuts salvaged from the bin at work – each one collected over six months until I had enough to work with, each different in length, width, and thickness, each slightly warped, cupped, or twisted. Half-lap joinery allowed me to work with those varying dimensions without re-dimensioning the material.
Joints were opened slightly on the bandsaw to account for warp, filled and glued where needed. The shallow hand-shaped concave in the seat carries over from my love of hand-shaping tactile contours – the only place where the material has been made to conform to the user.