Charcoal Line is the product design business that Thiti founded after leaving university. The furniture, lamps, vessels and fittings that issue from Charcoal Line do not need to yell to get attention. They speak calmly, assuredly, in a lucid perfectly formed language. A simple but uncommon language. In striving for simplicity of outline, form and volume in his design's Thiti, combines artistry with the sort of problem solving skills found in the sciences.

Thiti’s favoured wood is mango which can express itself in a variety of grains and colours. He prefers the light honey coloured form. Though he sometimes creates arresting contrasts between the light coloured timber and dark lacquer coatings, principally, and appropriately, black, the colour of charcoal’s infamous cousin, coal. In a recent variation on that black gloss finish Thiti has translated some of his wooden vessels into black glass.

In a different material some of Charcoal Line’s vessels would seem a little severe in appearance instead, being shaped in mango wood gives them a tactile character that makes them cuppable in both hands attractive. Attractive simplicity is always the aim but there is more to it than that. Some of the stools are a display in sensuous volume, even voluptuousness, and invite embracing as much as sitting on. ‘Stool boy’, is something else again: a dark timbered seat, a section of tree trunk that retains its bark, appears to sit atop a beautifully rounded, light coloured base. In fact the base and seat are a single piece of mango tree trunk, with the trunk left intact for the seat and the base revealed by turning on a lathe.

The perfection with which Charcoal Line’s timber pieces are realised belies the difficulty that some of the timbers used, present for the craftsman. Often lengths can be riddled with flaws. Rarely these can be incorporated into pieces in a way that reveals them not as imperfections but as elements integral to the design. Chiangmai craftsmen, renown for the great skill with which they use lathes are employed to shape the timber vessels, and others apply individual finishes.

Lamp shades and their bases wrestle over their connected, or disconnected state, like couples in a tenuous relationship.  The shade doesn’t always find a base so resides on the floor, resting, but still doing its job of illumination, or, it is attached to a wall like a hood on a peg. Lamp shades are seen as vessels that hold and dispense light.

Charcoal Line