Robin Boyd’s Furniture

Forty-six years after his death, Robin Boyd remains one of the country’s most enduring and prolific architectural thinkers, and thanks to a collaboration with one of Australia’s leading European furniture distributors, KFive + Kinnarps and the Robin Boyd Foundation, his legacy continues with the unveiling of the ‘Boyd Collection’.

Robin Boyd rose to prominence in the late 1940s for his promotion of inexpensive, functional, partially prefabricated homes incorporating modernist aesthetics. Robin applied the same principles of functional simplicity to the series of furniture he designed for his Walsh Street home and the Domain Park apartments.

In 1958 Robin Boyd, architect, writer, designer and critic, designed a house for his family at 290 Walsh Street, South Yarra. It was at Walsh Street that Robin realised much of the thinking about the art of architecture, which was later expressed in the books and extensive writings that brought him international fame.

Along with some favoured works of art and a library, the house was furnished simply, with pieces designed by Robin himself: two sofas, a dining table, two coffee tables, a sideboard and a daybed. Each, a masterpiece of crafted furniture, beautiful and functional, made from Australian hardwoods, covered with Australian wool fabrics and tables topped with cork tiles.

A collection of Robin’s Walsh Street furniture pieces are now exclusively produced and available to the public for the first time. The sofa, dining table, coffee table and a chair, are the first in the series to be released.

Manufactured in Melbourne, each piece has been faithfully produced to the same specifications, materials and functional solutions of Robin Boyd’s originals. Each piece is an expression of the creativity and versatility of his work and is testament to his design principles of durability, quality and clarity form. The Boyd Collection is a study of stripped back elegance and comfort with everyday use in mind.

Behind the making of each piece in the Boyd Collection are two collaborators who both share an admiration for Robin Boyd’s design aesthetics and exceptional furniture pieces, KFive + Kinnarps and the Robin Boyd Foundation – but more so, from a well-respected and long standing friendship between KFive + Kinnarps’s CEO Erna Walsh and founder of the Robin Boyd Foundation Tony Lee.

The Boyd Collection is available for viewing online or by appointment at KFive + Kinnarps’s showrooms. With recently unearthed drawings found at Walsh Street – original designs of Robin Boyd – the Boyd Collection will look to continue to grow with the addition of new furniture pieces that have never been seen before.

Proceeds from the sale of pieces in the Boyd Collection will be donated to the Robin Boyd Foundation for Design.