If you’re planning a sit-down dinner for 100 anytime soon, you might want to think of hosting it in London’s Hackney round the end of September. Italian-born, London-based designer Martino Gamper is certainly not short of inspiration, or chairs for that matter. He’s currently in the middle of a self-imposed project to create 100 chairs in 100 days, from a mixture of donated and found materials.

The softly spoken Italian recently let us into his studio for a sneak preview of the 80-odd designs he’s so far completed, and we had a comprehensive chat about his fascination for chairs, which you can read in full by clicking here. Click on the highlighted words in the text below to see our exclusive pictures of Gamper at work, in the studio and the chairs themselves.

Gamper’s Hackney studio is an impressive place, to say the least. He lives and works upstairs in the bright, high ceilinged space, surrounded by products from his back catalogue (including a selection of chairs), tools of his carpenting trade and an eclectic array of inspiration objects. Downstairs is a warehouse-sized ground floor; all industrial strip lighting, peeling paint, exposed brick and chairs in various state of make and unmake, which snake around the entire floor space. The individual chairs come in all shapes and sizes and materials. Some you want to own, some you want to throw on the fire- all inspire quite a definite reaction, which was Gamper’s primary intention: ‘people have very different reactions to all the chairs, some they love, some they hate but they all have their own, distinct character- I call it chairismatic.’ Click here to see the gallery in full.

Martino Gamper