Justin Brown, owner of 2Stone Designer Concrete in Calgary, Alberta, Canada, has had the idea for Luna Loungers for quite a while. “It’s basically a round take on a square chair,” he says.
He made the first one about five years ago simply to get it out of his head, where it had been stashed away for too long. The prototype lived in his showroom and made appearances at local home shows where the 180-pound seat generated a few sales among homeowners. But, he always imagined them in pods scattered on a university campus or a large grassy field.
That vision, or close to it, came true last year when Telus Spark, a science center in Calgary, Alberta, Canada, with interactive museum exhibits, ordered 12 Luna Loungers for its playground, the “Brainasium.” The all-weather, unconventional playground, which opened in fall 2015, was designed with both science and play in mind by encouraging visitors to think about how things move and how they connect. The loungers are placed in small and large groupings throughout the outdoor space.
“The play structures are not all swings and seesaws but rather random things that kids can climb all over,” Brown says. The designers liked the idea of a mix of larger and smaller seating made out of a sustainable product with a long life — in this case GFRC — rather than something made out of wood or plastic that would eventually expire. He adds it takes about one week to produce a Luna Lounger from form to finish.
Besides being comfortable and durable, these crater-like seats are both fun and functional. “If you have an ordinary chair, it looks empty when someone is not sitting in it. But the Luna Loungers have a sculptural function when they are empty. They become part of the design or landscape,” he notes, instead of looking like empty entities.
2Stone Designer Concrete, which has been in business about nine years, specializes in precasting lightweight fiber-reinforced concrete panels, tiles and furniture.
www.2stone.ca
