World of Interiors
Found Effects
April 2004
Words and photographs: Helen Miller
SAM ORLANDO MILLER likes finding things. Actually, he's in an orbit of his own when it comes to bringing home intriguing materials from which to make his furniture. I should know, I married him. So vast is his collection now we have had to move house to accommodate it. So here I find myself, surrounded by twenty acres of wild woodland on a remote hillside in central Italy.
Scale doesn't faze him. Last week he arrived home with a stack of chestnut planks, two slabs of alabaster and a pink butterfly wing. Each item then disappears into his cavernous workshop to become part of something new; perhaps a bed tomorrow, a table next week or it might lie-in-waiting for many years.
At the moment he's making a desk. He's been thinking about it for weeks and drawings have appeared on scraps of paper all over the house, the Landrover, even the lotto slips in the bar are covered in his scribbles. He has something specific in mind. Having helped me countless times to carry my desk from one shady spot to another he's going to make the new desk extremely light.
Sam makes all his furniture himself. Sometimes there are drawings which suggest a way forward. Other times a watermark on a plank of oak is the starting point. Usually he has a piece of furniture in mind, but distracted, he might spend days unravelling an Islamic pattern. Sometimes what was intended to be a stool might turn into a sculpture. A dodecahedron could become a sofa.
I wander down to the workshop to see what's happening and discover him rummaging in a crate. He picks out some gleaming star-head screws once bought in Rome. Beneath them I notice a Greek paper bag containing a handful of nails and am reminded of the many summer holidays I spent not on the beach, but trawling the hardware shops of various Mediterranean countries.
He then pulls out a length of dark mahogany. It had got lost several years ago somewhere near Park Lane and Sam had taken it in. Its day has arrived. To go with it he is heating a pan of beeswax made by his grandfather's bees. He weighs up the plank, eyeing its qualities and flaws, deciding which way he should cut it. However he does it will create new marks, which need to be considered with the existing ones. The air fills with the coppery smell of fresh mahogany. I stand back to escape the flying wood shavings.
One of Sam's earliest memories is of sitting on his father's shoulders at the 1971 Royal College of Art private view. 'It was like I was floating in a space odyssey, all florescent Perspex and white light.' That heightened experience stayed with him and as soon as he knew what an art school was he knew he wanted to be there. He chose Falmouth because it had shipyards and palm trees. It was there in the sculpture workshop that I met him.
That same year I found myself walking with Sam on a dirt road in the south of France. All of a sudden he bent down and picked something out of the dust. The small fragment of scalloped metal looked like nothing much, but he rubbed it clean and examined it intently. It wasn't a piece of Etruscan jewellery he confessed, but a run-over bit off a military belt. Nevertheless he was equally delighted. What fascinated me was that he had seen refined beauty in such a nondescript object. With the help of a paperclip he promptly made me an earring which I wore for the rest of the summer.
Not all his findings come covered in dust. He once came home from Granada with his pockets full of ecclesiastical ribbon. At the moment he's got a penchant for string. No piece of twine whether state-of-the-art kevlar or humble washing line goes past him unnoticed.
Sam looks at the world in exceptional detail. I once lost him in the Prado, Madrid. Eventually I discovered him in the Velasqueth room, scrutinizing a painting we had seen hours ago. He had noticed that the top of the picture had a dark area with a frilly edge. He worked out it must have been caused by the shadow of an earlier frame. This visual record of the life of the painting absorbed him completely.
The emerging desk is thin, elegant and destined for an exhibition in London. The newly prepared space is not a conventional white-walled showroom, but a former upstairs stable just off Berkeley Square. It was discovered by Sam's friend Cathal Mcateer, one of the creators of the fashion label Folk. Cathal needed a West End space to show his swish, beatnik menswear and to house his fashion company, Macandi. Cathal is as resourceful as Sam and found the building by Ocycling around endlessly at night'. Two horses' heads in the exterior brickwork made him curious. Once inside, it was Sam who discovered the tiles and bricks of the stable still intact beneath layers of cladding and carpet. The space was cheap, Cathal took it on, Sam directed the restoration and within a few weeks they were up and running, a horse's breathe from Bond Street.