There’s a room in Martex where the furniture doesn’t exist yet. There are sketches pinned to the wall, corrected,
crossed out, redrawn. There’s a prototype cut in half to understand what happens inside a joint.
There’s someone running a hand over a surface for the hundredth time, searching for the imperfection no rendering would ever show.
We call it Martex Lab. Not because it sounds good, but because that’s exactly what happens in there:
you search, you get it wrong, you start again. Until an idea stops being an attempt and becomes a piece of furniture.
Every Martex Lab object starts with a question – but not one we ask ourselves alone, shut away in a room.
It’s a question that comes from the market, from the people who live in workspaces every day and show us what’s still missing.
“What does someone working in this space actually need?” “What material tells this function best, and how long will it last?”
“How does a project flex to fit a need that keeps changing?” These are the questions that drive our ongoing research
– into new materials, into solutions not yet tried – always anchored to four fixed points we never compromise on:
sustainability, flexibility, aesthetics, function.
It carries no external designer’s signature because, this time, we saw the project through ourselves:
the vision of the people who live Martex every day, the technical knowledge of those who build, the stubbornness
of those who won’t settle until all four of these balances come together. It’s a way of working that stands alongside
– not in place of – what we do together with the designers we’ve always collaborated with: another voice in the same chorus.
This is how, in Martex Lab, our ideas learn to stand on their own: born from a real question, grown through research,
held together by what we believe in.
A new material doesn’t enter Martex Lab through the front door.
It arrives from elsewhere first – from industries that have nothing to do with office furniture: automotive, marine, construction, sport.
Someone notices it, brings it into the lab, and that’s where the slowest, least-told part of our work begins.
It gets tested. Stressed. Aged quickly to see how it will really age. We ask that material to withstand
everything an office will demand of it for years: weight, friction, light, humidity, hands touching it a hundred times a day.
We watch what happens after a month, after a year, after the point where a material usually starts to fail.
Many don’t make it through this stage. They stay an attempt, a sample on a shelf, an idea that wasn’t ready yet.
And that’s fine: it’s the time we take so we never promise something to the people working with our furniture that we can’t keep.
Because real research doesn’t have a deadline. It only has a question that stays open until the answer is definitive.
