They Fill the Old Screw Holes With Dowels, Then Make Sure You See Them

Prima Materia shows a new collection at Material Matters this week, the materials fair that opens Tuesday at UNLOCKED Shoreditch on Curtain Road and runs to 17 September. The London studio salvages high-quality timber and fittings from redevelopment sites before they reach landfill, then works with designer-makers to build furniture out of them. Co-founder Sophie-Claire Turner told London Design Festival that the new work turns on a single technique: a dowelling method that fills the voids left by the material's original fixings.

Those voids are screw holes and bolt holes, the record of a building being assembled, drilled, serviced and drilled again across sixty years. Standard practice with reclaimed timber is to fill and sand until the surface passes for new stock. Prima Materia plugs each hole with a dowel and leaves it deliberately visible, so a door frame's fixing pattern stays readable in whatever the timber becomes next. The studio runs a second record alongside the first, a Provenance Passport documenting each piece's material origin, fabrication process, embodied carbon and transport. One record sits in the wood. One sits in a file. Both exist so the object can be traced backwards.

The studio launched at last year's festival inside a vacant shop on the demolition site itself, close enough that visitors could hear the 1960s Holborn tower coming down while they looked at furniture made from it. Turner's argument is that reuse has to be visible, desirable and traceable before perceptions shift, and UK construction and demolition throws off around 68 million tonnes of waste a year, most of what is recovered ending up downcycled. Maybe the dowel is the part that does the persuading. What happens to the idea of a new object once the holes in it belong to someone else's building?