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Jader Almeida
b. 1981
Santa Catarina, Brazil
With a clear approach to design, Jader Almeida fuses the spirit of modernist architecture with the poetry and vitality of Brazilian customs and craft. The young designer builds on his native culture, skillfully mixing elements from Nordic design and other international movements to create pieces that exude an honesty of materials and attention to detail and form. From these inspirations, Almeida has created a design language that is distinctly his own, fueling a collection of over 150 pieces designed since the launch of his collection Sollos in 2004.
Almeida was born in 1981 in Santa Catarina in southern Brazil. As a teenager, Almeida had already started to gain practical experience working in the local furniture industry. This experience led him to study architecture and urban development at university. It was another job at a furniture manufacturer where he gained experience with typical Brazilian materials such as wood, leather, and wicker cane.
The distinction in Almeida’s designs starts with the process itself. He begins designing without the intention of arriving at a specific piece and instead works to understand materials, manufacturing realities, and the assembly required to create. This method of working was ingrained early on in his life at his time working at his cousin’s classic furniture shop and absorbed the technical side of fine wood craftsmanship.
In each of his products, his commanding use of materials, form, and proportions is exhibited clearly. His Teca Bar Cart features a concise design inspired by geometric elements which are refined into a pure expression of material while retaining the highest level of functionality. Likewise, his expertise in woodcraft is captured in his designs of chairs, like the Mad Lounge Chair. Here, he balances elements from mid-century masters with a characteristic modern approach which precisely translates into an arrangement of fluid lines, thickening and thinning to form a pleasant rhythm. He imbues this piece with references to classic Brazilian furniture through the use of a woven rattan straw back. Like the rest of his designs, these pieces reveal his adeptness of stirring an emotional connection with the viewer through the use of fluid lines, soft curves, gentle intersections, and delicate balances.
Almeida tends to categorize human behavior as his “Alphabet”. Every “letter” symbolizing the process of examining methodically how to use a chair, how to talk when sitting on that chair, how it feels when paired with a table. He explains that when introducing his new collection, the next one does not replace the previous one. Each new piece is placed as if it were a word that joins the others to form an increasingly rich poem of design.
