Step Inside Tom Golland’s Colour Playground

When life gives you free run of a powder coating factory, what would you do? Designer Tom Golland makes furniture. After graduating from Kingston School of Art in 2022, he now splits his time between working in an artist’s studio in London during the week and making his own work at Charnwood Paint Specialists on the outskirts of Loughborough at the weekends. His access to the factory – a business run by his brother-in-law – has shaped the direction of his practice. “It’s become a bit of a playground,” he says. “I can experiment here without needing huge resources.”

Recently, he’s been transforming aluminium and surplus pigment into a series of 15 vibrant side tables – playing with process, colour, and the constraints of small-scale production. The Batch Side Table is the first piece in Batch – an ongoing series rooted in repeatable forms, surplus materials and small-run production. Each table is built from five identical folded metal panels – a deliberate design choice to keep production simple, efficient and affordable. Tom prototyped the sheets in cardboard, refining again and again until the proportions felt right. “It’s all quite pared back,” he explains. “I never want the form to overshadow the colour.”

Colour is where Tom is most particular. He works with surplus stock – piles of pigment that might otherwise be discarded after industrial jobs like crash barriers or wheelchair frames. Each table features five shades, carefully sampled and adjusted until the right mix emerges. While much of the palette is reached through experimentation, a starting point for the series was A Dictionary of Colour Combinations – a 1930s reference compiled by Sanzo Wada, an artist, teacher and kimono designer. Wada’s pioneering use of traditional and Western-influenced combinations laid the groundwork for modern colour theory, and his six-volume guide – reissued in a compact, design-minded edition – offers 348 pairings. “You can have a rough idea,” Tom says, “but how it actually looks after the oven is another thing entirely.”

The result is a collection of tables of pleasing contrasts – their sharp geometry poised against subtly variegated surfaces. Tom has developed an application method that leaves a soft texture on the panels, tiny dimples that catch the light and shift with the pigment – the unevenness of the surface once again plays against the precision of the form. Each piece is finished by hand, and Tom checks every panel individually before it goes into the oven, often recalling it mid-process to make final adjustments with the powder gun. Some hues appear as a blur, others block-like. A few pigment mixes were almost lost to the bin after being mislabelled and mistaken for waste. “Luckily, I found it before it left the site,” he says, laughing.

Beyond this project, Tom has worked on commissions, including a kitchen splash back previously seen on Scura at the home of his friend, Motong Yang. Looking forward, he’s interested in scaling up – perhaps shelving next, using the same bolt-together logic. Looking forward, he’s interested in scaling up – perhaps shelving next, using the same bolt-together logic and low-waste approach that defines Batch. For now, though, there’s the quiet satisfaction of a Saturday spent with pigment and panels, working in a space that was never meant for furniture, but somehow suits it perfectly.