• Design Jobs
  • Firms
  • Awards
  • Conference
e

Core77

Sign In / Join Now;
e
  • Topics
    • Product Design
    • Process
    • Technology
    • Lifestyle
    • Business
    • Materials
    • News
    • Furniture
    • Tools
    • Transportation
    • Education
    • Footwear
    • Impact
    • Reference
    • Video
  • Features
    • Features
    • Yo! C77 Sketch
    • Photo Galleries
    • Bizarre Inventions
    • Design Calendar
    • Weekly Maker's Roundup
    • DiResta's Cut
    • Industrial Design Tips
    • Hand Tool School
    • Tools & Craft
    • Design Experience that Matters
  • Shopping Guide
  • Projects
    • Projects
    • Firm Projects
    • Reader Projects
  • Forums
    • Forums
    • General Discussion
    • Students & Schools
    • Design Employment
    • Sketching
    • Software & Technology
    • All Forums
  • About Us
    • About Us
    • About
    • Contact
    • Advertise

In Brooklyn, Reviving the Art of Crushed-Eggshell Lacquer

Red Hook's DLV Designs on how it transforms 1,800 eggs into a unique finish for interiors, furniture and household objects

By Carly Ayres - Sep 28, 2015

  • Join Core77 Today
  • Submit your projects for publication
  • }Favorite This
  • Y1
  • m1
  • U1
  • X1
  • H1
  • 2 Comments

Mark de la Vega has one of the more unlikely design success stories imaginable. In 2008, freshly laid off from a job at the retail-design firm Studio Sofield, de la Vega moved to Brooklyn with every intention of opening a taco shop. "I had a lot of experience [in restaurants]," he says. "I had made these really nice business plans. But we couldn't get a loan from the bank. Nobody was getting a loan for anything."

Meanwhile, however, friends had connected de la Vega with—wait for it—Madonna, who ended up commissioning a coffee table from the fledgling designer. (De la Vega has a degree in industrial design from the Art Institute of Colorado, and had done interior and furniture design at Studio Sofield.) De la Vega laid aside his taqueria plans to complete the Madonna piece, which led to other commissions. In 2009, he founded his Red Hook studio, DLV Designs; three years later, he debuted his first collection at ICFF.

A sliding barn door by DLV Designs with the Coquille d'Oeuf finish

Since then, he has relished tinkering with new materials, and one of his signature products has an unlikely story of its own. At Studio Sofield, de la Vega had worked on a Fifth Avenue penthouse once owned by Jacqueline Onassis, with dining room walls veneered with eggshell marquetry trimmed in bronze. In 2009, thinking back to that penthouse, de la Vega picked up a dozen eggs and sat down at the kitchen table with his mother, who was visiting at the time, and the two played around with ways to recreate the Coquille d'Oeuf technique, which was first invented in ancient Vietnam and later revived by the French designer Jean Dunand in the 1920s. "I was trying to put it on with wood glue," de la Vega says. "And then I was filling it in with a joint compound, when finally the idea of using resin dawned on me. That opened a whole other world to me."

Over the years, de la Vega has perfected the technique, which he now has down to a science. Each year, the designer orders 1,800 eggs from a farm in Pennsylvania, which he chose for the integrity of the shells they produce (a lesson he learned the hard way after cheap bodega eggs kept cracking and tearing). "We don't even try to get the food-grade ones—forget it," de la Vega says. "We have them send us their eggs that are past sellable. They just sit on the floor in boxes, because we can't refrigerate them, until we cook them. . . . The smell is pretty horrible."

A table with a crushed-eggshell border

De la Vega hires four or five helpers from Craigslist to assist with production; they begin by stacking the boxes of eggs in the studio's industrial kitchen, where they're hard-boiled in large spaghetti pots. The hard-boiled eggs are then run through a small band saw, slicing them in half vertically, leaving nice, clean orbits. Their insides are scooped out and discarded, with careful attention taken to peel away two membranes lining the inside of the shell that might otherwise discolor or lead to uneven surfaces down the road.

Step one: boil a lot of eggs

The resulting half shells are stacked and placed in large plastic storage boxes from IKEA. Processing the full shipment of eggs takes four to five days. A dozen eggs yield roughly a square foot of paneling, which goes into DLV Designs projects starting at $450—so those 1,800 eggs represent a potential $225,000 or more in product.

One the eggs are cooked, cut and cleaned, they're ready to be used as finishes. Some are put in storage for later projects; the rest are moved to another section of the studio for application onto panels and other pieces. There, a small wheeled cart with a can of spray adhesive, gloves and various X-Acto knives sits next to a flat file overflowing with wax papers covered in eggshells. For each piece, spray adhesive is applied to a section of the paper, and each hemisphere of eggshell is delicately broken and applied to its surface by hand—half guided, half following the shape of the shell. "Nobody knows how to do what we do," de la Vega says. "We've had to train everyone we brought in from the basics. It's hard work."

Applying the cracked eggshells to wax paper

Each eggshell is meticulously adhered, fitting in like a puzzle piece to what has already been laid and then broken to fill any empty spaces. "You start learning how to break them to get triangles and different shapes," de la Vega says. "Will this piece have petals? Sunbursts or fireworks shapes? It's interesting because you try to make this perfect thing, but you always end up with a slice missing and you start trying to fill in that slice." De la Vega says that mastering the process requires "learning how long it takes the glue to dry, how to clean it when you get pulled away and you have to go to something else, how to re-apply. It's very much about the 25 different skill sets that you pick up just trying to accomplish this one thing."

Each worker has his or her own "signature," de la Vega explains, so one person will usually handle an entire commission to keep it looking consistent throughout. "We have to get to a point where we can do a foot an hour, because otherwise, financially, we'll get slaughtered," he says. A large panel, such as for a sliding door, can take up to 80 hours. For those larger fields of paneling, workers build the layer of eggshell on large sheets of wax paper on top of huge wooden tables stacked throughout the space.

A nearly complete panel

Once a swath has been laid and attached to the wax, de la Vega and the workers will examine every inch to look for unattached bits or gaps that might cause bubbles once it's cast in resin. Using tiny brushes and their fingers, they'll clean any additional residue or dirt from the surface. After resin is poured into a mold, the eggshell-coated wax paper is lifted, folded like a taco, and then flipped upside down (so the concave surface is facing the resin) and gingerly placed on top. Air bubbles are released by gently working the wax paper, then poking and sealing larger pockets of air. The entire piece is then placed in a vacuum bag as the resin cures with the eggshells embedded in its surface. "The vacuum bag crunches every inch of it, and it's always terrifying," de la Vega says.

Once it's ready, the wax paper is removed from the surface of the shells, leaving a gummy layer of glue. Any resulting air bubbles in the resin's surface are left unfinished as remnants of the process. "You have to learn to embrace it," de la Vega says. "It becomes part of the character of the piece." Using acetone, the eggshells are cleaned by hand. An orbital sander is used on the surface, and any other light lacquers or sealants are added after that. A recent kitchen backsplash by de la Vega received an additional thin layer of clear resin on top to pass the "spaghetti-sauce test." "We gave them a piece, they put spaghetti sauce on it, and left it on there for a week, and then came back and wiped it off," de la Vega says. "It was perfect."

But after completing several large commissions, de la Vega has begun shifting toward a "less is more" approach. "It's hard for people to wrap their heads around how much labor goes into this," he says. "We're trying to shift from a furniture model to an art and gallery model." With smaller works that put the focus on the technique, the designer hopes he can lower the amount of labor necessary while still adding unique details to his designs. As examples, De la Vega points to a black coffee table with a white eggshell detail in the shape of a circle, which will retail for $20,000, and a mirror with an eggshell frame that he plans to sell for $10,000.

In the meantime, de la Vega is happy to divulge the details of his process, because he knows that the level of difficulty is so high that there's little risk of others ripping it off. "There's no real way to romance out a mistake," de la Vega says. "You have to get every step right or you've totally messed up a ton of work and money. That's why I don't even mind sharing this process—to anyone who wants to copy it, good luck!"

The latest design news, jobs & events.
Straight to you every other week.

Join over 300,000 designers who stay up-to-date with the Core77 newsletter...

Subscribe

Test it out; it only takes a single click to unsubscribe

  • }Favorite This
  • Y1
  • m1
  • U1
  • X1
  • H1
  • In the Details
  • Materials
  • Interior/Exhibition Design

Carly Ayres

  • x
  • m

Carly Ayres is a partner at HAWRAF, a new design studio in New York. She used to pen "In the Details," Core77's weekly deep-dive into the making of a new product or project. Along the way, she's covered rugs with dinosaurs, shrink-wrapped buildings, kinetic military boots, and a myriad of other topics that can just barely be classified as industrial design. She attended the Rhode Island School of Design and lives in New York.

1 Comment

  • John Feilmeier
    3 years ago
    Z
    Z
    Reply

    what do they do with all of the cooked eggs? free lunch for the workers?

    !Report as spam

Core77's Design Directory

View all Design Firms »

Hot On Coroflot

Motorola NPTZ basic home camera Vincent Chan
JAM BOOKCASE Sven Rudolph

Recent Posts

  • SmartBowl: Homeware from Hardware

    By Joshua Skirtich - 3 days ago

  • A Dental Industry Tool for Getting the Last Drop of Product Out of a Squeeze Tube

    By Rain Noe - 3 days ago

  • Watch Nicole Gibbons' "How to Disrupt an Oversaturated Market" Talk at the 2018 Core77 Conference

    By Core Jr - 3 days ago

  • These Bolts Change Color When Tightened Properly

    By Rain Noe - 3 days ago

Continued Reading
  • In the Details
    4 Comments

    By Carly Ayres - Sep 21, 2015

    Marc Newson on Modernizing the Fountain Pen

    "There is something quite magical about a magnet."

    While all eyes are on a certain Pencil announced the other week, let us shift our gaze to another writing instrument, the fountain pen. Last June, Montblanc announced the M, the product of a new partnership with Marc Newson, arguably one of the most influential designers alive today (and, coincidentally,

  • In the Details
    2 Comments

    By Carly Ayres - Sep 14, 2015

    Making an Immersive, Human-Size Kaleidoscope

    With 320 zippered aluminum-composite panels, installed by hand

    While there's certainly no shortage of reasons to be pessimistic about humanity and its future, I would like to take a moment to share a multifaceted glimmer of hope: Somewhere in this world, there exists a giant kaleidoscope that you can walk inside, basking in the glory of your own

  • In the Details
    1 Comment

    By Carly Ayres - Sep 01, 2015

    Building A Rubber Band-Powered Race for the Ages

    Designing Art Center's beloved Formula E(lastic) car competition

    Ready, set—snap! Earlier this month, Art Center College of Design hosted their annual Formula E competition (the 'E' is for elastic) where students, professionals—and anyone else crazy enough to participate—are invited to build and race rubber-band-powered toy cars. The main competition takes place on the art school's Pasadena campus, but

  • In the Details
    6 Comments

    By Carly Ayres - Aug 24, 2015

    Getting From Kickstarter Into People's Kitchens

    The Duo Coffee Steeper raised $193K online. Then its inventors actually had to get it manufactured.

    If you're anything like me, you're already on your second French press of coffee, fully caffeinated and shaking to the point of full-body convulsions as you dive head-first into another spectacular Monday. As you run your tongue along the back of your molars, however, you are horrified by the gritty

K

{

Welcome

  • YSign In with Facebook
  • mSign In with Twitter
  • USign In with Linkedin
OR
  • jSign In with Core77 Account
  1. Forgot password?
  • Cancel

Don't have an account? Join Now

K

{

Welcome

Create a Core77 Account

  • YJoin Now with Facebook
  • mJoin Now with Twitter
  • UJoin Now with Linkedin
OR
  • jJoin Now with Email
  • Cancel

Already have an account? Sign In

By creating a Core77 account you confirm that you accept the Terms of Use

K

Reset Password

Please enter your email and we will send an email to reset your password.

  • Cancel
Today On the Core77 Network...
  • ]Design Jobs

    • Foundations of Art/Graphic Design Teacher

      St. Andrew's School Middletown, Delaware
    • Industrial Designer/Design Strategist

      The Clorox Company Pleasanton, California
    • Industrial Design/Design Strategist

      The Clorox Company Pleasanton, California
    • Project Manager

      Muse and Company, Inc. Oakland, California
    • Post A Job
    • View All Jobs
  • ]Design Directory

    View other design services:

    • *Hot On Coroflot

      • Jumpstart Charging Systems

        Ryan Paul
      • Beverage Dispenser

        Jonathan Smith
    •  

      • ET TOY WORK

        Rurik Tyler
      • ECCO Biom Venture TR

        Ventsislav Nikolov
    • © 2019 Core77, Inc. All rights reserved.
    • Terms
    • Privacy Policy
    • Contact
    • Advertise
    • About
    • )
    • m
    • Y
    • '
    • S
    • © 2019 Core77, Inc. All rights reserved.
    Advertise Here