UNLEASHING A DESIGN SPIRIT ANIMAL.
Bespoke furniture pieces, originally created for Melbourne’s Vue de Monde. Explore the uniquely sustainable craft of designing with kangaroo pelts and their beautiful leather hides.
VDM collection is a bespoke furniture group, based on the original Tiller chair and Terra Firma table, and introducing a new armchair with tables created for Melbourne’s premium restaurant Vue De Monde.
In exploring the uniquely sustainable craft of designing with kangaroo pelts and their beautiful leather hides, Ross Didier sought to express a new Australian design language, without being kitsch or clichéd.
Kangaroo skin is extremely unique; relatively thin but very durable. It has ancient characteristics relating to reptiles and is regarded as the strongest known leather in the world but given that the hair follicles are not hard wearing, the fur was upholstered to the backs of selected chairs and the skins to the front seating faces.
The kangaroo leather was dyed black and all the inherent life markings like scratches, battle wounds and insect bites were left exposed to tell their stories.
Ultimately the chairs became a nod to untamed and under-utilised beauty; reimagined through craftsmanship and a poetic lens. Both artefact and invitation, VDM is a tactile echo of the wild, designed for spaces that honour provenance and poetic restraint. The VDM chairs are not merely a place to sit; they are an encounter, an unspoken dialogue between material, form and environment.
“I was playing around with kangaroo skins and pelts, thinking how I could work with this beautiful, culled produce. In considering by-product and the use of waste, I looked to indigenous cultures all over the world, who use the whole of animals with a nose-to-tail philosophy - ensuring that every part of an animal is prepared and consumed, letting nothing go to waste. I strongly adhere to this ideology and find this the ultimate respect because if the animal must die then its continued cycle should be put to full use.”
Ross Didier
