Li’s Forecast #9

This is the plank you don’t want to miss

Lidewij Edelkoort

Column

April 2026

Lidewij Edelkoort

is one of the world’s most beloved and influential forecasters. She writes a bi-monthly column for See All This titled The Future is Handmade, where she shares her views on a handmade future and spotlights unique handmade objects. Today: a seemingly ordinary wooden utensil, executed masterfully.

Column

April 2026

Few objects need as little design as this one. Plain and straightforward, the plank is simply a piece of wood that has been planed smooth, with rounded corners, and is used for cutting bread and vegetables. A larger size lends itself to serving cheese; two identical planks can serve as plates for two croissants. These days, I like using small planks instead of plates for lunch. There is something immediate about it, almost like a chain reaction: from slicing bread to filling bread to eating bread. It feels new.

Because of the attention the kitchen has received in recent years, planks like these are becoming more interesting. Antique examples are in vogue – once made by hand, irregular, with awkward handles, and sometimes still to be found in brocante shops. And yet they remain ordinary basic objects, so ordinary that we hardly ever think about them. Until, suddenly, we come across an unusual plank at Society Limonta, a unique textile shop, during the design fair in Milan.*

To take part in the Salone on a modest scale, the shop developed a concept for several special planks in collaboration with the original designer, architect Riccardo Monte, who in fact designs and chars furniture. These wooden planks, longer and sharply heraldic in shape, have a primitive character, especially because they are made from reclaimed wood or treated with fire to blacken them. Monte works, as he says, with ‘the authenticity of materials and the archaeology of texture’.

Lidewij Edelkoort

‘How a plank acquires a soul, I think then – how lovely that even something so small can become so exciting’

The effect is immediate and unavoidable: the ordinary plank sees the light and suddenly assumes a different position, now truly belonging to the kitchen. These planks take on a new role: for cracking nuts, arranging fruit, or composing a still life with red chicory and a pomegranate.

I myself bought an extra-long, extra-thin, almost witchy black specimen, and use it behind my black stove to display onions and garlic. As a bonus, there is a sweet, super-small plank which, because of its shape, still has character, and now serves as a coaster for my little Japanese teapot. How a plank acquires a soul, I think then – how lovely that even something so small can become so exciting.

The masterful planks, very large or very tiny, are part of Riccardo Monte’s Oltre collection for Society and are now available in our Art Room. They form part of an important body of work that comes into being in a rustic house-cum-studio in the Italian Alps, which Monte shares with photographer Katie May.

Like two truants, they left busy London behind to build an entirely different life and repertoire together: one in which he gives form to his craft, and she photographs it. How good that this greedy society can still bring forth people with such focus. There is hope.

*When I first discovered this shop years ago, I was completely taken by its use of colour. Only later did I realise that they were clients of my colour forecast, and that, in a way, I had stepped into my own palette – an enormous compliment!