The Studio

Objects & Ideas is the studio of designer Di Tao, working between Toronto and Trent Lakes, Ontario, since 2015.

Why This Studio

For more than a decade before founding the studio, Di designed for international consumer brands. The work was good and the products sold, but the same pattern kept repeating: objects were designed for a short life, built to be replaced, and consumed on a schedule decided in advance. A well-made product could reach the end of its planned life and be discarded while it still worked.

Objects & Ideas was founded against that cycle. It began with a plain conviction: that it is worth making things people want to keep—for years, for a working lifetime, for long enough to pass on. The work is made by hand and in small numbers, where design, artistry, and longevity belong to the same decision.

Two Ways of Making

The practice has two modes that share a method but not a material. The wood furniture is the studio’s open, ongoing line: numbered pieces designed by Di Tao and built to order by Stephen Kitchen. The papier-mâché is a limited-edition body of work that Di makes himself, transforming everyday paper pulp into sculptural objects with mass and presence.

On Expression

Every piece begins with an observation: the slow curve of a marsh, a beaver at play in the water, a contrail twisting through the sky. Rather than imposing an idea on a material, the work looks for one already there. The piece that follows is built to hold the geometry of that moment in a usable form.

Much of the work begins at Trent Lakes, in rural Ontario. The property was once a hobby farm—sixteen and a half acres, a backyard that reads like a provincial park: water, trees, and the long changing light of a place left mostly to itself. It is where much of the studio’s work first takes shape.

The People

Di Tao is the studio’s designer and author of its work. Bob Dodd, co-founder, leads press and is the studio’s first point of contact.

Elsewhere

The studio’s work has been shown at IDS Toronto, Sight Unseen OFFSITE, and ICFF, and featured by Architectural Digest, the Financial Times, Azure, and Sight Unseen, among others.