Nick Ross continues to test how far restraint can go before vanishing. In Mixed Grill, shown at 3 Days of Design, he turns leftover wood into vases—distilled forms balanced between structure and trace.
Nick Ross continues to test how far restraint can go before vanishing. In Mixed Grill, shown at Other.Circle during 3 Days of Design in Copenhagen, he turns leftover wood into vases—distilled forms balanced between structure and trace.
Ross showed Mixed Grill, an offshoot of his ongoing Primitive Arrangements series. It’s a group of vases made entirely from scraps—thin strips of wood shaved off during the making of nine identical chairs he presented in Milan earlier this year. Same material, same logic, just what was left over. The kind of stuff usually swept off the floor.
He calls it “a second serving,” which sounds flippant but isn’t. There’s precision in the move—taking something that wasn’t meant to be anything and turning it into a form that still holds the DNA of the original. The vases are narrow, straight, and undecorated. They don’t try to perform. They’re filled with handmade paper flowers, which might seem sentimental, but don’t read that way in person. They sit there like punctuation. Not embellishment—more like contrast.
There’s no emotional arc here. No reveal. That’s what makes it good. Mixed Grill isn’t a commentary on waste, or craft, or anything in particular. It just continues a thought. A kind of clarity that arrives only when nothing is trying too hard to mean.
