UC157
rotor blade & 18th century old beams
140x80x45 cm
Year built
2026
Function
Aux Table
Status
No longer available
When a client walks in with a helicopter tail rotor blade under his arm and tells you he wants to do something special with it, somewhere else they might show him the door. Here, we stood up and applauded.
The piece was already an object of cult before we touched it. A high-technology safety component — one metre long, slightly cambered, with a decreasing cross-section, safety-locked bolts and rivets polished to flight tolerance. White with three black stripes and a chrome edge. It had reached its maximum flight hours and could no longer fly — but for an engineer like Iñigo, an absolute feast for the eyes.
The client had spent his career as an executive in the helicopter industry. He had the blade. He had his new home. He wanted something worthy of both.
The drawings accumulated on their own. When a project grabs you like this, stopping is not an option. The solution was a coffee table where the blade acts as the longitudinal lower support — the spine of the piece. We had been wanting to try carbon fibre lamination in vacuum bag for a while, and this project was the perfect match. To complete the contrast, we brought in eighteenth-century ancient timber in its most honest state: rotted head, accumulated layers of old paint, untouched beyond the shaping.
The wooden top — oval, with progressively rounded edges — carries vacuum-laminated carbon fibre on its underside, visible in black against the wood. Three tubes of the same material connect blade and top. The blade untouched, uncut, intact in everything that makes it extraordinary. Three materials that have nothing to do with each other, behaving as if they were always meant to be together.
